| |
He’d also learned three things about himself. He hadn’t entered a store like Big Z’s in... he couldn’t even remember how long. Why bother? He had a phone, a finger, and Amazon Prime. Barring that he always had an assistant or intern ready to rabbit off to run any errands for him. A latte. A burger? Groceries. And that realization made him feel like a jerk. Why had he ever thought it was okay to send someone on a Starbucks run for him. And lastly, he liked watching Walker Kent. A lot. And not just because she was hotter than hell in a summer heat wave.
There was something underneath—a mystery and a vulnerability that fascinated him. A little frailty that skittered beneath her skin at unexpected moments. A shadow that flitted across her astonishingly beautiful eyes. And that mystery combined with her Lombard Street curves, sexy voice, quick, almost shocked laugh, and keen intelligence that turned conversation into a clash of rapiers at dawn had sucked him in before he knew he’d even arrived at her door.
“So what’s next?” He tried to play it cool and not let her know how much he was enjoying himself. “A tour of the town?”
“Yeah, all few blocks of it.” Walker laughed, this time a little bitterly.
Definitely a story there. And even though he was done with chasing down maybes and might have beens, Calum had always been a sucker for stories. His head said “don’t ask.” His mouth wasn’t yet on board.
“And you don’t have a car because...”
“Does it look like I need one?” Walker demanded, spreading her arms wide left and right.
He looked up and down the obviously named Main Street. The western themed store fronts stretched only a few blocks and ended in a leafy swath of a park surrounding a stately courthouse that just screamed history, justice, importance, established law and order, and civilized man. Behind the courthouse in the distance were foothills that rolled scenically towards a mountain range, the tallest peak, he’d learned since he’d arrived into town, late morning in his show-owned tricked out Escalade, was called Copper Mountain. It soared above the town looking purplish in the early afternoon light.
He’d researched the town briefly when he arrived after he’d received Walker’s email. Not because he was interested in whether the Graff Hotel was haunted—a lot of old hotel’s had stories and some of them panned out—but he’d just been shocked by the serendipity of her email. He’d decided that he would go to Marietta to look up Laird Wilder, whom he hadn’t seen much of in years, even though they kept in touch regularly. He’d just texted Laird that he was “coming through town,” and within seconds “floop.” Walker’s email showed up in his inbox with Marietta Montana historic Graff Hotel haunted as the subject line. And then Laird had texted back. “Come stay at the ranch long as you want.”
Even a burned out ghost quester and a man who’d believed in nothing but the hunt for so long—and he abandoned that hope long ago—couldn’t pass that up.
“You might need a car when the snow comes.”
Walker looked like she was going to say something, and then she shrugged. “I like to walk.”
He wondered. Decided not to push this time.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Walker said. “Dangerous.”
“Dangerous.” He tasted the word and found that he liked it when centered around her.
“While I wear black while on the set for a little ambience, that’s probably as dark as I get,” he said and then slid her a look as she shivered in her suit. He took off his motorcycle cut leather jacket and draped it around her shoulders. Now his jacket would smell like her. His blood stirred at the thought.
He tried to remember the last time he’d warmed a woman with his jacket. He was officially pathetic. And losing his mind.
“I meant you are thinking too much.”
“If you knew my thoughts, perhaps they could pose some sort of danger.” He felt a little lit up with the flirting, like his life suddenly had a gleam to it when he’d been going through the motions for so very long now. “But of the more pleasurable bend.”
“So it’s your thoughts that have a kink.”
It killed him that she just took up his tepid feeler of a challenge and just tossed it back in his face. Saying no to this gig was going to suck. But he could play it out a little longer. That wouldn’t make him too much of a jerk would it?
Walker’s beautiful eyes lowered and she nibbled at her full bottom lip. “Do you want a tour of the town?” her voice sounded uncertain for the first time, and she looked left and right before her gaze met his. “Would that help you get more ambiance for the shoot? Maybe you’d want to interview some townspeople for some local color and some of their experiences. I learned... I mean many of the buildings on Main Street have been refurbished and reinforced over the years but quite a few structures retain parts of the original from when Ephraim Grey founded the town and built Grey’s Saloon back in the late eighteen seventies when he arrived here. A Grey heir has run the saloon even since.” She pointed to a building that had swinging doors in the front and a balustrade balcony running along the upper level.
She sounded like she was reading from a travel brochure.
“I could arrange an interview for you,” Walker said politely, the public relations professional.
No longer was she the swashbuckling woman who had slid down the banisters before tumbling down the stairs locked in his arms and landing on his lap in a heap. He could still feel the warmth of her body against his.
“I set up and do my own interviews,” he repeated. “More authentic.” And, for a moment, he actually pictured himself doing that—interviewing Marietta residents about the town, the hotel, any possible paranormal experiences they’d heard about or experienced. Why? Because he was an idiot.
He was becoming obsessed with the long, graceful line of her neck, especially when she swallowed. He’d made her nervous. And he loved that as much as he hated it. Contradictions. Walker Kent was full of them.
“So, Walker, how long have you lived in Marietta?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
He gave her his seriously look.
“Because you look about as local as a high-speed bullet train.”
Again, he was treated to watching her pulse kick up in her neck and then the delicate smile.
“I’m not that fast, unfortunately,” she said carefully. “I certainly could get a lot done if I were. So is that a no to touring the town?”
“Don’t imagine there are many men who say no to you, Walker.”
Her eyes widened and, for a moment, he imagined she looked astonished, then skeptical, and then finally a little sad. Not what he was expecting. A surge of something that he hadn’t felt for a long time—the desire to protect bloomed. Not good at all. Things always went badly when he seized the mantle of a knight in shining armor. Much better to focus on sexual attraction. Less messy. Besides, he hadn’t been lead around by his cock since... well, it felt like forever.
Good to be alive.
“So,” he said, getting close to rattle her self-contained cage more than a little. “You going to tell me how long you’ve lived in town or about the quilt?”
“The quilt?” She nearly jumped out of her fancy shoes, which were not conducive to walking around small-town Main Street, in his opinion. But then he wore biker boots, tennis shoes, or flip-flops. He hadn’t even worn dress shoes when he received his first Emmy.
“C’mon,” he said keeping his voice loose and persuasive even though he was pissed. She looked too guileless. “You’re too smart for games that dumb, and I might look it, but I’m anything but dumb.”
“I don’t think you’re dumb,” Walker said, her features tight, and her fair skin flushed.
He couldn’t help it. He reached out and caught a tendril of her hair that had freed itself from the twist she had it skinned back in and let it fall through his fingers.
“You have the coloring of a red head,” he murmured, musing, not really meaning her to hear.
She took a step back and away from him. “The tubs will be delivered to the hotel soon,” she said her voice flat and empty of her earlier personality. “I need to get back.”
Calum watched her, his frustration mounting. The quilt bothered him. It seemed overtly aggressive and cheesy, neither traits he’d associate with her, and Calum prided himself on a being an excellent read of people. In his business, he had to connect with people to do good interviews and connect with viewers to entertain and grow his show. But if she hadn’t placed it, then who? And how? He’d checked his bio on line. There was nothing in there about falcons or other birds of prey, but maybe by cross-referencing she knew he helped to fund a bird rescue and rehabilitation facility in the Anza Borrego Desert. Still.
But a baby quilt so similar to the one his grandmother had made him was, even for him, a bit spooky. He wouldn’t even know he’d had a quilt like that except she’d kept it at her house and when he’d come to live with her when his parents had died in an accident, the quilt had provided a small measure of comfort and had been a talisman. When his grandmother had passed away last year, he’d brought the quilt to his small oceanfront house in Ventura, just because it reminded her of his gran and their bond.
He didn’t like being played. He’d planned to hear her out and then gently say no to exploring the Graff Hotel for a feature. Now he wanted to shout “hell, no.”
So why hadn’t he?
Why had he followed her on an errand for the hotel?
Why was he standing here on Main Street USA, staring at her in this town like they both had some answer he needed? Sure, she was beautiful and sexy and smart and hiding something. And the town was cute but he’d been in a lot of historical and cute towns over the years. He’d done shoots all over the United States, Canada, Europe, and Mexico. So what was different? He felt a pull. He’d felt that before. To a place, though, not a person.
The wind kicked up sending the tendrils of her hair that had knocked loose when they’d tumbled down the stairs streaming across her face, and a shaft of light that had been behind a cloud briefly lit her, and in the darkish brown of her hair he could see fiery lights of red and gold glow through the uncompromising brown.
Interesting. Not many women colored their hair darker unless they were high school or college students going goth. Calum looked critically at her creamy complexion, the smattering of freckles her foundation couldn’t quite cover. Her lighter eyebrows, and the pale grey color of her unusual eyes. There were shadows there. And exhaustion.
Definite story here.
Not all ghosts were dead.
And then, he nearly kicked himself. He’d been so busy telling her he wasn’t stupid and wasn’t going to be pulled in by her schemes when he remembered something else in the attic. When he’d been railing about the quilt, she’d barely looked at it. She’d been focused on the chair. And she’d been scared, but trying not to show it.
Damn.
Hard to walk away from so many years of wondering and searching. He ran his hand through his hair.
“How about we talk about why you emailed me about ghosts over a coffee,” he said.
And level with me about the quilt.
He might make a lot of money entertaining people while he chased ghosts, but Calum didn’t like to play games. He preferred to cut to the chase.
“Coffee,” Walker murmured and palmed her large Americano and reluctantly took a seat at a small corner table of the Java Café.
She’d come here the first day she’d started work for a little liquid courage. The coffees were delicious, but everyone had seemed to know everyone else, and she’d felt like a blinking neon sign spelling out “stranger.” Conversation had stalled, and she’d felt people’s stares. She’d likely been overly sensitive, but Walker had bolted before anyone could possibly take the drastic step of actually saying hi to her.
She watched Calum order. He’d chosen this table, but it was framed by the window, and a potted plant partially blocked them from view of the counter and the entrance. She should move it away so people walking by or entering the coffee shop might catch a glimpse of the famous ghost quester. She could almost recite what the speculation on social media platforms would be, and the Graff could use all the social media boost it could get. Surely loads of people in a simple, western town that could trace its ranching and mining roots back over a century and a half, would have ghost legends galore.
Walker slipped out of her seat but before she could do more than grip one of the branches of the leafy plant to give it a good tug, she felt Calum stand at her back.
She froze and let the tree go. It rocked back crazily, and for a moment, Walker thought it would tip the other way and spill dirt all over the artfully distressed wooden planked floor.
“Didn’t pick you as a tree hugger,” Calum said, easily catching the tree and righting it. “Redecorating? That too is part of your skill set?”
Walker unnecessarily smoothed her hands down her skirt, and checked her jacket to make sure it still covered her adequately.
“I had a tickle and thought I might be allergic,” she lied, and then inwardly winced.
Really, for someone who’d been accused of scheming, lying, colluding, and covering up, she really should have been a better liar.
“Tickle?” Hands on her shoulders, he gently turned her around.
Walker had given up blushing well over a decade ago, but whew, it was hot in here, and she barely managed to not pluck at her blouse in an attempt to cool herself down.
“My nose is better now.”
Calum sat down at the table, leaned back in the wooden chair, and toed around another chair. “I’d say your nose is pretty perfect.”
“Thank you,” Walker said, a little stiffly, still embarrassed at being caught out, but even as she went to sit down, Calum kicked up his long, lean legs in cuffed black denim and ending in motorcycle boots and placed them on the chair. She nearly sat on his legs, and caught herself at the last moment and shifted her weight.
“Such a gentleman. Your mother must be proud,” she said drily.
“She died when I was twelve.”
“Oh, Calum.” Walker sat down hard on a chair across from him. “I’m sorry.” She cursed her fair skin that went along with her strawberry blonde hair. “I’m not usually so... insensitive.”
She squirmed on the chair, feeling awkward when she wanted to be polished and professional. She was used to writing and controlling political messages, deflecting difficult and dogged questions from the press smelling blood. She’d always run a tight ship for a powerful senator. Yes, that was in the past but not so far back, and now she was having trouble controlling one cable show host.
“That wasn’t insensitive. You had no way of knowing.” His face went a little pensive.
“Is that why you started hunting for ghosts.”
“Questing.” He corrected and laughed.
“Questing,” she repeated and her breath caught.
He really was handsome, almost devastatingly so, and television didn’t do him justice, and without the thick-framed glasses, he was darn near deadly.
“That makes me think of Jason and the Argonauts off on a hero’s quest.”
“No. I’m not a hero.” The light in his eyes dimmed, and Walker had a mad desire to try to be funny, to make him sparkle one more. “And Jason ultimately did Medea wrong.”
And now he had to go and say something like that.
“Careful, Calum, championing a wronged woman over the highly praised hero of the story will win you all sorts of points, and then there’s the whole literary history buff points accumulating.”
“I was a history and film major at USC.”
Deflecting. Walker recognized it for what it was. Calum had not told her about his mother or her tragically early death. She raised her cup to her lips. Why did she want him to confide in her? They weren’t friends. She wasn’t about to drag out her family’s baskets of dirty laundry, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him about her suddenly sordid past.
“How about you?” he asked conversationally.
Walker opened her mouth and then closed it fast. She couldn’t tell him any of that. Saying political science and public policy might jog his memory at some point and he’d recognize her. She had often been unfortunately in the news for a few months of the investigation. But she couldn’t say nothing.
“UCLA,” she confessed.
“A Bruin. Awesome. I was a Trojan.” He laughed. “We’re rivals.”
“But now we’re on the same team,” she said, sipping at her Americano.
She wanted him to feel that. She wished it were true. She wanted the feature for the hotel, for the publicity and for the future. And she really needed something to go right when so much had gone so wrong for so long.
Briefly she wondered what it would be like to have coffee with Calum as a friend and to not want anything from him other than his company except his humor and energy. After her long tumble from the top with no friends reaching out to help break her fall, she had to admit she’d never had a true friend. Coffees had been strategy sessions or pitches to get something from her. Did she even have a friend anymore? Maybe someone from college, but she’d been so focused on politics, on the future, fun and friendship hadn’t figured. Jared had been her confidante.
She should be mourning the loss of Jarod more. It had only been six months since she’d discovered him cheating, and then soon after that he’d been instrumental in helping to throw her under the scandal bus barreling down.
She sighed and stared into the inky black of her cup. Always deflect. Defer. Deceive. She was tired of it. She wanted someone to trust. She sat upright. Where had that come from? She couldn’t trust anyone. Had she ever had that, trust? She’d thought so. Before.
“You don’t seem like a team player,” he mused. “You’re a leader. But tell me, what made you lead with the quilt?”
“I didn’t lead with anything other than an inquiry via email.” Walker was used to schooling her features in a controlled blend of skepticism and indulgence.
Worked well with the press. Or it had until it hadn’t. But she was no newbie. She knew she needed to maintain confidence and cool professionalism.
“You overplayed your hand.”
“I wish I’d been given a hand to play,” Walker said, a little bitterness butting in when she definitely didn’t want it to. Small towns devoid of a media market didn’t excite her, but tough.
She was stuck.
She’d felt like that so often in the last year, but she’d naively imagined up until the very end that justice and truth would ultimately prevail. That by being honest and knowledgeable and diligent, she would not be the one thrown to the wolves to bloody.
Wrong.
“Fine. Tell me about the quilt.” They both said at once.
“Jinx.”
Then Walker laughed, and it felt good, freeing, although the way he stared at her was not funny. Was it attraction or suspicion? God, she was becoming paranoid.
“Ladies first,” Calum said softly his eyes focused on her over the rim of his mug.
He has a beautiful mouth.
The thought just popped in her mind. Calum’s mouth was the last mouth she should be noticing or speculating about, but she’d bet with his looks, easy charm, lifestyle, and celebrity of sorts, he had his pick of women. So he’d kissed a lot.
Walker was not that in to kissing. Kissing seemed so intimate. She’d always wanted to accomplish so much and her world had been so dog-eat-dog. No one could see her vulnerable.
She’d thought Jared had been perfect. So clean and organized. He hadn’t been much of a kisser and definitely never PDA. He’d been very cautious in bed, boring really, but passion soon fizzled—everyone said so. Common goals and mutual respect were key, although having sex with Walker’s intern in Walker’s office while he knew she was still somewhere in the senate building hardly screamed respect.
“Why does the quilt make you sad?” Calum asked curiously, and Walker realized she hadn’t answer his question.
“I wasn’t thinking about the quilt,” she confessed feeling almost guilty. “I didn’t really pay any attention to it. I was thinking about something else.”
“Someone else?”
Her eyes caught his, and heat prickled her cheeks. He was really good at this, the questions. Why hadn’t she factored in his skills interviewing that he did during his one-hour weekly show. She’d been distracted by the darkness and the spirit boxes that gargled out unintelligible noises that made his three assistant co-questers scream and run away, one of them shouting “boy-o” in a really bad half English/half Irish accent as if he couldn’t decide which accent sounded more intense and scarier.
“Yes,” she admitted in a soft voice. “But that’s over now. Really, really over.”
“How long were you together?”
His voice was so gentle, and sitting at a small table having coffee with him so natural that she found herself answering. “Five years.”
“That’s a long time.”
Walker nodded. She waited for something—the flash of dismay, the anger, the hurt, the embarrassment, the whole ugly ball of unwanted emotions to roll over her again and knock her down but nothing. Even the café seemed quiet like it was holding its breath.
“How long ago did you split up?”
“Over six months.”
“So it still hurts.”
She stared in her coffee and wished she took cream or sugar so she had something to do. It should hurt. It really should. She knew that. Maybe something was really wrong with her. She looked up at him.
“No.” Her voice sounded so lost and far away. “I don’t miss him. I think that’s what... bothers me the most. I miss the idea of him, but not the actual him, and we were engaged. We’d been engaged for almost a year.”
She stuck a spoon in her Americano just to give herself something to do. She had no idea why she’d told him that much, but it was like a compulsion to come clean about something.
“I loved him or thought I did, but...” She pulled her spoon out of her drink and laid it next to the mug, fiddling with it to make it perfectly parallel, until Calum’s hand covered hers. The warmth seeped through. “I don’t think I loved him. Not him, who he was inside, but more the image of him that he projected, the image of us as a couple,” she said.
A power couple. Invited everywhere.
He looked at her, and she felt almost as if he understood, as if he could get inside her head or her soul and hear the words she couldn’t say.
“I don’t think I’m capable of love.”
There. She’d said it. Almost her worst secret. One of two she’d never said aloud. The silence stretched and pulled, but instead of being uncomfortable, Walker relaxed just a smidge. Something seemed freed up inside her and she breathed in a little more deeply.
“You’re capable of great passion,” he said, the intensity in his blue eyes nearly swallowed her. “And a deep and lasting love.”
“You can’t know that,” she said. And she felt like the brittle fault lines of her heart cracked and oozed. “And I don’t even know if I want that to be true.”
“I know it. No doubt. Your fiancé was the wrong person for you. He was flawed, not you.”
If he only knew! An image of Jared, her assistant Britany on her knees in front of him, his face etched deep with pleasure, and expression he’d never had with her, rose up spectral and taunting.
“No,” she practically shouted to shove the image away.
She’d said too much to him, had no idea how he’d gotten her to say anything of the past. The past was the past for a reason, and she had to live only in the present so she could get through this awful part and have a future.
Worse, she could sense Calum’s first spark of interest had been about her and her story, not a possible ghost. And while she didn’t want any focus on her in case the press still thought she might be a story—see how far Senator’s Wickham’s longtime aid and chief of staff had fallen while the senator considered a presidential run—she had to give him something to intrigue him enough to feature the Graff in his Halloween special, his last show of the season.
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you too much about the quilt,” she said quickly, but she wanted him to tell her why it was so significant to him.
She could tell the abrupt change of topic startled him. Likely, he didn’t believe her. Jared had been nearly impossible to read. His face had been so smooth and expressionless except... no. Stop.
She dragged her thoughts back to the table. “I’m a little embarrassed to tell you why I was freaked out, but I will. But you have to promise not to laugh.”
Calum crossed his arms and regarded Walker, his earlier irritation had already swung back to curiosity and puzzlement. He could not make her out, and that hadn’t happened to him in years. She was a contradiction—organized, controlling, confident, and then easily thrown off her stride like in the attic. Then the decisiveness at the hardware store when ordering the totes so she could reorganize the storage area of the hotel, but then her complete lack of poise when they’d stood on the street corner. She’d looked lost, and even a little alarmed. And then the goofy banister move, and now trying to get him to promise he wouldn’t laugh when she shared a story like they were in middle school.
He was intrigued. Honestly charmed. But when she’d told him about her ended engagement, she’d made it sound so bloodless and passive, even as her eyes darkened in pain and sorrow. Her confession that she didn’t think she could love had reached into his chest to squeeze his heart like a fist. He’d felt the same for so much of his life. Hadn’t wanted to even try a serious relationship.
Ironic. Just when he felt like he couldn’t take one more step on the path he’d been on for so many years, she appeared like a contradictory sexy angel and held out her hand, demanding he get up and walk.
“I can’t promise that so just spit it out.”
Irritation skittered across her face, but she smoothed out her features quickly. She looked really practiced at that as if she was accustomed to hiding her feelings. PR would do that to a person, but with the suit, and the poise and the careful way she spoke, she didn’t seem like a small farm town girl made good. She’d gone to UCLA, maybe she’d grown up in California. But why Montana now? She had an appealing maturity so this wasn’t a started job.
“This is hard for me,” she said, looking quickly around and then learning forward. One hand circled her coffee cup, and he saw her knuckles were white. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
A delicate pink flushed her cheeks, and he could see the red descend down her neck in a hot wave and blotch along her collarbone. A woman that sophisticated blushing. He couldn’t believe it. She hadn’t when he’d casually and instinctively flirted. She’d given it right back to him, but talking about a stunt flustered her, which meant she was accustomed to being honest. Something fluttered in his chest.
Hope.
Ignore it.
“I hadn’t seen the quilt before. It wasn’t there when I was up in the attic earlier in the morning looking for Halloween decorations. Then I got your email that you were actually going to be in town visiting a friend.”
Calum pulled another long draw of his coffee and watched the myriad of expressions flit across Walker’s unusual grey eyes. In some light they looked almost blue. Mysterious. Her eyes reminded him a little of being in a planetarium, not the color because they weren’t that dark, but leaning back in a chair and watching constellations swirl overhead had always awed him and made him feel a little dizzy and out of his body. He felt like that now with Walker, like he was looking through something, looking at something far, far away, like he was looking at forever.
Walker sucked in a deep breath and looked around the coffee shop. They were far from anyone, but she still looked nervous. He thought of suggesting a walk, but wanted her to focus. And we wanted to read each nuance. He’d learned early how to detect when someone was lying and attempting to play him.
“I was in the attic for the first time when I noticed the chair. I’m not sure why really...” The words were slow, thoughtful. “It was this big ugly chair, right in the middle of the room. There’s other furniture up there—wardrobes, chest of drawers, tables, chairs, but they were all covered with sheets but this chair was out in the middle of the room like someone was sitting there.”
She pressed her lips together, and looked at her hands clasped around her coffee mug. “It just felt...”
He let the silence breathe like he always did.
“You’ll think I’m...”
No more came out. He waited. Calum Quest didn’t show it on his cable show because dead air was a big fat no, but he knew the power of silence. Words started to fill in the blanks, but he discarded the all not wanting to lead her or to provide an easy way out.
He leaned forward, deliberately let his hands rest close to hers on the table, not touching but he could feel the low hum of her energy. His was always hyper. The kinetic energy that had taken so many sports and so many building and engineering projects to burn off hadn’t cooled down as he hit his mid and now late twenties. But he’d mastered keeping his body still even when every nerve and impulse shouted to move.
“I’m not like that.” She fiddled with her coffee cup as if she couldn’t’ quite figure out how to arrange her hands. “I’m not imaginative. I’m probably the last person who’d be visited by a ghost,” she confessed.
He narrowed his eyes. “You contacted me this morning, before ten so shortly after your experience with the chair.”
“Experience makes it sound like I sat in it and it started floating around the room with me clutching the arm rests and screaming like a teen in a horror film.”
“Actually a floating chair would be cool.”
“But hardly practical.”
He bit back a laugh. “I’d find uses for it,” he said, loving how heat flared in her eyes.
“So, Walker...” His eyes lit on the small silver disc that lay flat in the hollow of her throat.
Elegant, restrained just like the woman. And he noticed the unusual calligraphy initials engraved across the disc. WW. Had her fiancé’s name been William? Had the necklace been a gift? Why the hell was she still wearing it if the jerk had been stupid enough to let her go?
He dragged his mind back to the present and met her reluctant gaze. “Can you tell me more about the quilt?”
Walker put her hands in her lap, palms flat, fingers spread on each thigh. She shrugged and looked at him helplessly.
“I’m sorry, Calum. I didn’t really pay any attention to it. I know it wasn’t on the chair when I first went up there early this morning. And then when I went back up to try to put the stacks of boxes in some sort of order so I knew what I’d have to work with, I didn’t see the quilt. It wasn’t in any of the boxes and it wasn’t on the chair. It’s just so... so strange.” Her eyes met his and he felt chills ripple down his spine.
“I believe you.”
Him. The skeptic.
He could see some of the tension in Walker’s body ease, but she still had something on her mind.
“I just don’t see the point of it,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s been up there in months since there wasn’t a rodeo this year, those decorations weren’t needed. So who would go up there and put out a quilt?” She looked at him, her gaze speculative, curious. “And why did it bother you?”
He opened him mouth to answer but shut it. He was the one who asked the questions. But something about the directness of her gaze, the confidence that he would answer compelled him to admit the truth.
“It looked similar to one my grandmother made for me when I was born. She was really into birding, especially birds of prey. She volunteered at a bird sanctuary and specialized in rescuing and rehabilitating raptors who’d been shot or poisoned or had been injured in some way often by cars.”
Walker blinked. He could see the rejection in her eyes and waited for her to voice it. Again she surprised him.
“That quilt must be so special to you, Calum,” she said. “Do you still have it?”
“I’m the one supposed to be asking questions.”
“I haven’t noticed you lacking in that area.”
He smiled.
Walker sipped her coffee and then sat up straight and squared her shoulders. “I’m sure there’s an innocent and unspooky explanation.”
He felt she was keeping something back.
“I...” She stopped and shook her head.
Definitely holding something back. He’d seen it so many times before. Choosing her facts. That wouldn’t do at all.
He leaned forward into her space. “Tell me.”
“I can’t tell you that. You’ll think I’m pretending like the people on your show,” she whispered. “You’ll walk right out of here.”
“I’ll walk if you don’t level.”
She huffed out a breath. “It’s so stupid and vague. From the moment I went into the attic, I had a feeling about the chair. I felt uncomfortable. Antagonized, like someone was spying on me, and I wanted to challenge the chair, which sounds dumb.”
“I would love to see you confront a ghost,” he said. “Classic. And I bet the audience would love it. I can imagine the tweets and Snapchats we’d get.” The fingers on both his hands flexed out and he made the exploding sound. “It would go viral.”
“I doubt it,” she said coldly. “I’m boring and would ruin your episode.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The concept of Walker boring did not compute.
“You promised not to laugh.”
“No, I didn’t. Besides that wasn’t part of your story. That was side commentary. But admit it. The idea that you could be boring is hilarious.”
She blinked at him. “Stop teasing me. Do you want to hear this or not?”
He sucked in a deep breath trying to jive his image of her with the image she had of herself. He gave up for the moment, but it niggled in the background.
“Sorry,” he said easily. “Please continue.”
“Anyway,” Walker’s voice tightened. “The chair felt electric somehow like static electricity or when I used to live in Southern California and we’d get these winds—the Santa Anas—and the air just felt alive, like it was super charged and everything inside of me just felt like it could crackle. I could feel the air on my arms and even—” She stopped dead and pressed her lips together tightly. “You said you were a Trojan so you must know about the winds.”
“They make me feel high,” he said. “And some people crazy and homicidal, but back to the chair. I need to know what else you felt,” he said finally after Walker seemed to have run out of words but the furious wash of color down her neck and collarbone were giving him all kinds of ideas ranging from R to triple X.
He didn’t think she would answer. But Walker Kent, her unusual grey eyes clashed with his, and her shoulders kicked back, but still her voice was a whisper that drew him closer.
“Undone.”
