Chapter Eighteen
It was Tuesday night.
The snow and everything it brought, mainly Nate, had all melted, leaving a muddy mess where it had once been pristine and white.
Innocent.
There was nothing innocent about the dreams that Luna remembered every morning.
Nate holding her.
Nate smiling down at her.
Nate bending close and just when she thinks he’s going to kiss her in her dreams, she wakes up. Always at the good part.
With her bags packed and waiting by the back door for his o-dark-hundred arrival time to get them to the airport, Luna was a mass of bundled nerves.
And Miley was laughing . . . at Luna’s expense.
“It’s because I haven’t been laid in forever,” Luna explained away the hormonal dreams and anxiety about the thought of spending a significant amount of alone time with Nate over the next few days.
“That can be a problem.”
They were currently standing over Luna’s bed, where they’d hauled their laundry to fold and stack into piles.
“And those damn sweatpants. I swear I’m going to burn every last pair of them when I get home.”
Miley scoffed. “Don’t you dare. I kinda like checking out your brother’s ass in those things.”
Luna tossed a sock aside and searched for its match.
“What do I do if he makes a pass at me? He was so close. I was so close.”
“What do you want to do?” Miley asked.
“Want and should. What I want I shouldn’t do. Why does he have to be so . . . nice?” She spit out the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth.
“Nate is right, your bar is too damn low.”
“You’re not helping, Miley.”
Miley took up the edge of the bed and stopped folding the shirt in her hands. “You’re thinking too hard on this. This isn’t a workplace romance. You don’t work in the same office.”
“But we do work for the same person,” Luna reminded her friend.
“Subcontractors. It’s not the same.”
Luna had said that to herself a dozen times since Nate had driven away.
“It’s never pretty when things end,” Luna moaned. “And they always end.”
This point Miley didn’t try to argue. “But it’s fun while it happens. You have to admit that. And when was the last time a decent man showed up at the door that offered a little romance?”
“You’re supposed to be talking me out of this.” Luna gave up on the sock search and shook out a pair of jeans.
“Luna . . . Lu!”
She stopped folding the jeans and gave Miley her full attention.
“After your divorce you made me promise you that I’d never sit back and watch you make a mistake like Landon again. I don’t think giving Nate a little bit of your . . . time, is a bad thing.”
“But—”
“What has you so worried? And don’t tell me the ‘you work together’ line. I’m not buying that,” Miley asked.
Luna rolled her shoulders and shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s . . . different.”
“By ‘different’ do you mean a decent guy? I’ve seen the ones you’ve chosen to hook up with over the years. Let’s just say they were perfectly safe from you falling for them.”
Luna rolled her eyes. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? I’m not judging. I get it. Sometimes you just need to be held. You have to admit the few that have been around since Landon were intellectually or emotionally unavailable.”
“That’s by design.” Luna was the poster child for emotionally unavailable, and she was highly cognizant of it.
Miley pointed to her chest. “I think that’s the crux of the problem. I think you like Nate. I think he makes you feel something you’re afraid of feeling.”
“When did you become a psychiatrist?”
“I’m serious, Luna. Nate goes beyond the ‘nice guy’ category.
You barely knew the man, and he showed up when your car got jacked.
Then stayed with us in case something sinister went down.
Then he hung with Ash all day. And you know Ash.
If he thought there was an ounce of ugly in Nate, there was no way in hell he’d have suggested he drive over in the middle of a snowstorm to see if you were okay. ”
“True.”
“There isn’t a more overprotective brother than yours. He knows your triggers, even if he can’t identify his own. He’d just as soon jump in front of a train than let anything happen to you again.”
Luna sighed. “I know. He creates monsters that aren’t there sometimes.”
Miley scrunched up her face. “I don’t know about that. He goes with his gut and isn’t often wrong when he does.”
“No one showed up at the house the night my car went missing,” Luna argued.
“We don’t know if someone drove by . . . saw Nate, and decided it wasn’t worth it.”
Luna hadn’t considered that.
“You said yourself you felt like something is off. Something was coming,” Miley said.
“I think a lot of that was Jorden’s tarot card reading,” Luna excused away.
“No.” Miley shook her head. “You said that before Jorden’s reading.”
“I’m not sure what all this has to do with Nate.”
Miley picked up another shirt. “Do you want to hear my final thought about why this thing with Nate is bothering you so much?”
Probably not.
When Luna stayed silent, Miley told her anyway. “You never go into anything with a man without knowing exactly why it won’t work. When it ends, you get to say, ‘I knew it.’ You can’t do that with Nate. And that scares you.”
Luna felt her shoulders relax. “That’s where you’re wrong. It won’t work with Nate because we work closely together. If we start something, it will end because of that.”
“Workplace geography? I’m not buying it. Geography issues evolve when the guy you’re with is in San Francisco when you’re in Seattle. Like that lawyer . . . what was his name?”
“Reuben.”
“Right, Reuben. You worked with him, and you didn’t use this excuse.”
“He was too far away for anything serious,” Luna said.
“Bingo!” Miley lifted her voice. “And Nate isn’t.
And he doesn’t have a wife, or crazy ex, or a place in the unemployment line, or an alcohol problem, or kids, or a bookie on speed dial .
. . Did I miss anything? Oh, yeah . . . and his dates aren’t transactional.
The man has literally spent the night here twice and the closest he came to anything remotely sexually suggestive was an ‘almost’ kiss that you haven’t stopped thinking about. ”
Midnight jumped up on the bed and planted herself right in the middle of the clean clothes.
Miley placed a hand over Luna’s. “Sometimes we’re so busy looking for the red flags we ignore the green ones. Right now, Nate is kinda perfect. I’m sure he’s not. I’m sure he snores or has bad morning breath.”
Luna wanted to cry. “He doesn’t snore.”
Miley laughed. “Maybe he has a small—”
Luna stopped her with a stare. “Gray sweatpants!” Which didn’t exactly hide everything.
“Then he might not know how to use it.”
Luna felt laughter bubbling.
“Give the guy a chance. He might be Don Juan in bed. If he is, I’ll be the one telling your brother to do a background check on the dude,” Miley said. “Nobody is that perfect.”
“Exactly.”
They both laughed, the tension and worry inside Luna started to ease.
Midnight jumped up and growled. A guttural sound Luna only heard when she saw an animal on the other side of the window threatening her existence. The hair on her back stood on end, eyes sharp on the bedroom door.
Luna and Miley abruptly stopped laughing and looked toward the empty hall.
A loud noise coming from downstairs brought every cell in Luna’s body alive. A metal sound, like something banging on a pipe.
Were they having an earthquake? Luna looked around the room to see if anything was shaking. Everything was still.
Luna grasped Miley’s hand.
The noise stopped.
“What the fuck was that?” Miley whispered.
Midnight jumped from the bed and inched to the door.
“Where’s the gun?”
“Downstairs in the hall closet,” Luna whispered.
“Lotta good it is there,” Miley whispered back.
Making as little noise as possible, Luna stepped to the door. Like the night Nate had been outside lurking, every hair on her body stood on end, and her heart was beating out of control in her chest.
Everything was quiet.
Midnight swished her tail, and some of the rigidity in her stance eased.
“Do you hear anything?” Luna asked.
Miley shook her head.
“Did you leave something on the kitchen counter? Maybe we had a tremor.” California wasn’t the only state that had earthquakes.
Luna peeked beyond the door.
Miley stood directly behind her.
“Anyone there?” Luna yelled. Her voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard in the quiet house.
Silence.
Then she remembered what she’d yelled at Nate when she thought he was a criminal sneaking around the house during the winter storm. “I called the police. They’re on their way.”
There was nothing.
Midnight had sat back and was now licking her paw.
“Something must have just fell,” Luna said.
Still, they moved slowly to the stairs, eyes and ears alert.
Miley ducked into Ash’s bedroom and came back with a baseball bat.
By the time they made it to the ground floor some of the tension had left.
Midnight walked in front of them.
“No one’s here.” Luna stood tall and used a normal voice. “Look at the cat.”
Tail wagging, disinterested in life.
Even the night Nate showed up, Midnight had been on full alert until Nate followed Luna into the house.
“What was that?”
And then Luna saw it.
On the floor in front of an open cupboard door sat a saucepan and a frying pan.
Miley grabbed Luna’s arm.
Luna stared, mouth wide open.
She shivered.
“Maybe Harper and Ash know something I don’t,” Luna choked out.
“If you’re in this house long enough, you’ll see things you can’t explain.”
Luna squeezed Miley’s hand. “We’re going to need more sage.”
Luna hadn’t been in the car five minutes before Nate heard the words.
“The house is haunted.”
“What?”
“It happened last night. Just like the stories I’d heard. Miley and I were upstairs. We heard noise in the kitchen. We went down to investigate and there were two pans on the floor in front of an open cupboard.”
Nate gripped the wheel and kept looking at Luna in the passenger seat.
“Maybe the cat—”
“Midnight was with us,” Luna said.