The only problem with receiving $10,000 of the large sum my mom received was that I felt bad for my team. We had taken the job thinking we’d be financially rewarded and now we didn’t get anything. So I did the only thing I could do and split the money evenly four ways between us, hoping it would make up for the fortune we’d lost out on. I guess at least we had gotten to prove ourselves as paranormal investigators and had righted a historical wrong. That had to count for something, right?
“Are you thinking about Michigan again?” Brighton asked. “You have that angry look on your face.”
“It just makes me so mad that she got money and she didn’t even do anything,” I said.
I knew I was whining and being unreasonable, but I sort of didn’t care.
“You seriously need to work out your sibling rivalry, Sade. It’s not healthy,” Deacon said.
“Speaking of not healthy,” I began, “I guess I’d better go deliver the disappointing news to Jefferson about our ‘vast fortune’.”
“He’s off being a crazy person in our apartment,” Deacon said.
“So he’s being himself,” I said over my shoulder.
I closed the door behind me and walked across the small hallway to Jefferson and Deacon’s apartment.
I knocked on the door but received no answer, which wasn’t surprising given the classical music that was blasting through the door. Until that point I hadn’t even been aware you could “blast” classical music.
Sighing deeply, I turned the knob and entered the apartment, only to find complete and utter chaos on the other side of the door.
Jefferson was wearing his normal slacks, a white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and suspenders. His “white” shirt, however, was covered in dirt and soaking wet, and in the middle of the hardwood floor in their living room, sat a piano. Or half of a piano.
Wood pieces and piano keys littered the ground, and Jefferson was running his hands through his curly wet hair, staring with his mad, wide eyes at the broken piano in front of him.
“What are you doing?” I yelled, my voice barely audible over the music.
Jefferson turned quickly at the sound of my voice. Apparently I had startled him. He had a manic look on his face, which was just as smudged with dirt as his shirt, and he grinned as I walked over to him.
“Look what I found in the alley downstairs!” he exclaimed.
“How on earth did you get it up here?”
“One piece at a time,” he said. “It’s brilliant! It’s just what we need in here! I’m going to fix it up and put it right against that wall there. Don’t you think it’ll look amazing in here?”
“Do you even play piano?” I asked. My voice was quickly tiring from all of the yelling.
Jefferson looked indignant for a moment.
“I play beautifully,” he said.
His lips pouted out a bit. Probably because I didn’t keep a running fact sheet on his talents like he did for me.
“Can you please turn down the music?” I yelled. “It’s ridiculously loud.”
“It’s Danse macabre!”
“I didn’t ask what it was; I asked if you would turn it down,” I shouted once more.
“I can play this on piano, you know,” he answered with another manic grin. “Brilliantly.”
I guess if I had to deal with one of Jefferson’s extreme moods, I was just lucky it was a good one today.
“That’s great,” I said, as I scanned the room to find out where the music was coming from.
As if willing the music away, however, it suddenly stopped, taking the lights with it.
“You blew the power,” I said in the sudden quiet.
“I think the storm blew the power, Sadie,” Jefferson responded.
He was probably right, although I didn’t tell him that.
Wordlessly, Jefferson gathered a few candles from junk drawers in the kitchen and lit them, giving us at least a little light in the messy apartment.
I sat on the old couch, shivering against the chill in the room. “Can you really play the piano?” I asked after a moment.
Jefferson lit the last of the candles and then joined me on the couch. “I come from a snobby elitist English family—of course I can play the piano.”
He was definitely in a good mood. Sadly, I would have to ruin it when I told him how much money we’d actually be getting from the investigation that had taken up so much of our lives the past few weeks.
“Sadie?” he asked, before I had a chance to hand him the small sum of money.
“Yeah?” I figured he was going to bring up the whole Doppelgänger thing again, even when I told him the topic was off limits until I had some time to think it over.
“You said I have you,” Jefferson began, actually looking very hesitant all of a sudden.
I sighed deeply.
“I think the phrasing is creepy. We need to change that around to something less slave-ish, but yes, you have me.”
“You like me?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure why he had gone from “let’s build a piano” to “let’s talk about our feelings,” but I humored him—only after looking around the room to make sure Brighton and Deacon couldn’t hold this against me later, of course.
“I like you, Jefferson.”
He was crazy. He had terrible mood swings. He was way too honest and often confused romantic gestures with something a serial killer would do. But for some odd reason, I liked him. We understood each other and we filled something in each other, no matter how weird our relationship seemed to be.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“Too intense,” I said, cutting off his question. “The only way this relationship will work is if I tell you when you’re being way too intense and you tell me when I’m being too obsessed with normalcy.”
“Fine,” he said, looking very put out. “You don’t have to say it yet. But you do like me. I mean . . . me. Right?”
“I’m confused,” I said. “I already told you I like you. What else would I like?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, his huge owl eyes now avoiding mine. “I’m just trying to sort it out.”
I shook my head at him and tilted his chin so that he was forced to look at me.
“I don’t know what’s going on in that overactive imagination of yours, but I can promise you that I like you.” I leaned in tentatively and gave him a slow kiss.
We weren’t really at the point in our relationship where I felt like I could just kiss Jefferson whenever I wanted, but something told me he wasn’t going to pull away. He placed one hand on my waist and the other on my cheek, drawing me to him and deepening our kiss. I still sort of hated that I had no control over the burning feeling in my chest when I was around Jefferson, but right at that moment, I loved it.
I loved that he smelled like cinnamon and that his curls tickled my forehead when we kissed, and I loved the way everything was so deep and intense when we were together. Everything seemed heavy.
Knowing that I couldn’t avoid telling Jefferson about our “financial reward” by kissing him forever—as appealing as that sounded—I pulled away slightly, biting his bottom lip lightly with a grin.
“That’s payback for the first time we kissed,” I said. I was still grasping his collar that I hadn’t realized I’d grabbed. “You bit my lip and made me bleed.”
“Oh, I remember,” he whispered, his eyes closed and a smile on his lips. “I love you, Sade.”
I opened my mouth to protest his words, but he quickly cut me off.
“And I forbid you to say it back to me right now. When you say it—and you will—it’s going to be out of the blue and because you feel like it’s the right time to say it and not because you feel obligated to return the sentiment.”
“What makes you so sure I’m going to say it?” I asked with a challenging raise of my eyebrow.
“I just know,” he answered.
Maddening.
At least if he had to say the “L” word, he’d still given me a definite out. I knew I liked Jefferson. In fact, I liked him a lot. But I wasn’t ready to just throw that word around when we hadn’t even really established that we were together.
“Now,” he began, breaking the tense moment and quite obviously changing the subject. “You were about to tell me that you aren’t marrying me for my money, right?”
I wasn’t sure where his joke had come from, but it was pretty spot-on.
“First off, we aren’t married, or engaged, or anything close to it,” I said, feeling it was important to stop his over-the-top behavior before it started. “And second, you’re about to receive some very bad news about your financial situation, so I can’t really be marrying you for your money.”
“My financial situation?” he asked, puzzled.
“Remember how we were supposed to receive financial compensation for our investigation and instead it turned out my family got the inheritance, but still I assured you guys that we were getting some money back?” I asked.
I never knew how Jefferson would react to something.
“Yes,” he said.
“Turns out we only get $2,500 each.” I pushed the small wad of bills into his hand. “Which is about two months of rent for the world’s crappiest apartment.”
Jefferson looked down at the money in his hand and actually laughed before placing the money back into my hand.
“I don’t want your money, Sadie,” he assured me.
“Just take it,” I said. “I’m tired of paying your rent.”
“It was one month,” he said in exasperation.
We’d had this argument so many times that it was old-hat now. Leaning my shoulder against the couch back and draping my legs over Jefferson’s lap so that I sat parallel to the wall, I rolled my eyes at him.
“One month is a lot of money,” I said. It was the same argument I always began with.
Jefferson draped one arm over the back of the couch so that his long fingers could play with my pixie cut, giving me chills as he continued to smile at some secret joke only he knew.
“I told you I’d pay you back,” he reminded me.
“Is that what this is?”
“Sadie, my father wasn’t an idiot,” he said.
I didn’t follow his thought process at all. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“He had pretty well guessed that my mum was a gold digger before he died,” he said. “And he could see how cold she was to me. It was obvious I’d never get a pound out of her unless it was to help me move to the States and get as far away from her as possible. Have I mentioned that my mum can’t stand me?”
“Once or twice,” I said in exasperation. I wished he’d stop joking around and get to the point.
“My father left me a hefty trust fund,” he finished. “So again, I don’t want your money.”
I sat in silence for a moment with a furrowed brow, trying to understand what Jefferson was saying.
“Wait,” I began. My anger was rapidly building. “Are you telling me you’re rich?”
“That’s a vulgar word,” he answered distastefully, still playing with my hair. “But yes. I suppose I’m rich.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Why on earth have I been paying your rent if you’re rich?”
“One time,” he said again with practiced patience. “And I told you I’d pay you back. I just wanted to see if you’d actually do it. I’m a bit wary of gold diggers, as you can imagine.”
“I wasn’t even trying to marry you, you psychopath!” I yelled, pulling out of his grasp. “I didn’t even show any interest in you!”
“I can see that I’ve upset you for some reason,” he said. He was still trying to be calm, although the look of panic on his face was overriding any of his other emotions.
Of course Jefferson Parrish would be confused over why this would upset me.
“Why were we scrounging for food money during the entire trip?” I asked, my voice much louder than I had intended. “Why were we staying in the sketchiest of hotels where I was lucky to not be kidnapped? You didn’t even ask your mom for the money we used on the trip, did you?”
“I wouldn’t ask my mum for money if I were dying and her money was the only thing that would save me,” he said.
“Does Deacon know?” I asked, wondering just how betrayed I should feel.
Jefferson winced. “More or less.”
“More or less?” I repeated in a dangerously low voice.
“He knows I have money, but he thinks I can’t touch it because it’s in a frozen bank account.”
“And why would he think that?”
“Because that’s what I told him,” he said with another wince.
“Jefferson Parrish! Why are you such a crazy person?”
“I just wanted to make sure the people in my life were there for the right reasons,” he said. “Besides, I thought you’d be pleased I had money.”
“Why would I be pleased?” I asked, mimicking his accent.
I wasn’t really sure why I was so upset. Mostly it just seemed a bit hypocritical that he was all about being honest with me, yet he had hidden this huge secret. Although, given his upbringing, I guess his reasoning was sound.
Still, that wouldn’t stop me from being outraged at him for no good reason.
“Because what’s mine is yours,” he said, as if this should be obvious.
“We aren’t married!” I shouted at him.
He narrowed his eyes at me, as if I was putting a damper on his crazy idea of our impending marriage that he had somehow decided was happening.
I tried to slow my breathing down and not let my rage get the better of me. I really couldn’t feel too justified in being mad at him, since his financial situation was really none of my business.
“You said you would always be completely honest with me,” I accused. I was bringing my voice back down to an acceptable indoor level.
“You never asked.”
As he said it, I could see that he realized how terrible that reasoning was.
We were both silent for a moment, my legs still draped over his lap as I absently played with one of his suspenders, reasoning the whole thing out in my mind.
“Well, I’m definitely keeping your portion of the investigation money,” I told him. “And you owe me for one month of rent.”
“Which I will pay you right away,” he promised.
We fell silent again. I wasn’t really sure what to say.
“Now I’m going to marry you for your money just to teach you a lesson.”
“That’s an acceptable punishment,” he agreed with a fake, somber nod. “Because even if I trick you into marrying me, eventually you’ll come around and figure out that you love me.”
I rolled my eyes at him, still not smiling, but refraining from yelling at him as well.
“I’m sorry I lied,” he finally said.
“Are you sorry you made me sleep in awful hotels and eat the worst food known to man?” I asked, the joking lilt returning to my voice ever so slightly.
“I am,” he said. “And I intend to make it up to you.”
“And how exactly are you going to do that?”
He grinned his large manic grin once more, his owl eyes crinkling in the corners as he stared at me.
“Fancy doing an investigation in England?”
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Acknowledgments
The Husband and I are notorious nerds. And we just happen to love Ghost Hunters, the month of October, scary movies, haunted houses, and basically anything creepy. Because of this, it was only natural that I’d write a book about a group of ghost hunters. So I feel like the biggest acknowledgment should go to The Husband for indulging and encouraging my love of all things creepy.
Jackie Hicken. You angel. You perfect specimen of an editor/friend. Just thank you. Thank you for everything. And thank you for putting surgical gloves in Brighton’s bra. That was my favorite.
My critique group (Mikki Kells, Heather Ostler, and Lisa Harris) needs the biggest shout out of all because they’ve been reading this story for the past year and promising me that Jefferson’s intensity is endearing and not off-putting. Which was helpful, since I was starting to think I was the only person in the world to think it was romantic. Creepy is the new cute, right guys?
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