by J. D. Mason
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Ida and Julian,
finally
Acknowledgments
When writing stories, sometimes as you go along, you believe that you have it all figured out. You think you know how characters are going to be, how they’re going to behave, and live. In some cases you may even know how the story’s going to end. I believed that one character was gone from my life for forever, but I should’ve known better because I fell in love with him. It’s funny because he and I have had a roller-coaster relationship that has often left me angry and in tears, but just when I thought I’d washed my hands of him for good, he comes back and does or says something to win me over again. He’s been emotionally abusive to me for years, but I stay because he’s in my heart and soul.
Thank you, Jordan Gatewood, for being the person you are, even when you were at your worst. And thank you, Abby Rhodes, for being magical.
I’ve been obsessed with these two for nearly two years and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I’m hoping that readers will be pulled in to their relationship the way that I have been and that they’ll never want to see it end. Personally, I’m really not all that romantic. Never have been and I never thought I wanted to be until I realized that, like most women, I get butterflies in my stomach when reading stories with romantic encounters, hoping that everything will work out despite the pitfalls and setbacks. I have had that hope for these two from the moment that I knew they had a story to tell, but watching their relationship unfold as I wrote it, I realized that there is never a guarantee that love can conquer all, no matter how much you hope that it can. Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to. That’s a hard lesson. One that makes life interesting.
Thank you to those readers who have been on this journey with me for so many years. When I first started writing, I believed that over time the job would get easier. The truth is that it’s harder to write now more than ever, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I still get nervous before every release wondering if people are going to like my story, which isn’t always the case, but so many of you have stayed on this train with me and for that, I am so very appreciative. Reading, like writing, is a labor of love, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re all in this together. It’s lovely being reminded of that.
As always, much gratitude goes out to my editor, Monique Patterson, her assistant, Alexandra Sehulster, my publisher, Macmillan, and my agent, Sara Camilli. I’m still here because of all of you, and I thank you so much for all your support and encouragement.
To my family, thank you for your patience. It’s been a busy couple of writing years and I couldn’t have done it without you all leaving me alone, ignoring me, letting me ignore you, and not going off on me when I was irritable, overworked, and overwrought. And most important, for still wanting to be around me when I finally popped my head up from my Hobbit hole to rejoin the living.
Blink, Texas
Trouble Me
“FIRST OF ALL, I’m not a medium, Abby,” Marlowe Brown said, walking up the steps to the house before she’d even said hello.
“You’re not, but you’ve got a good sense about things like this.”
Marlowe showed up today wearing at least a thousand golden braids that hung down to her waist, looking every bit the regal goddess that she was.
“Second of all,” she said, stopping in front of Abby on the porch. “You already know it’s haunted. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“I need you to tell me how haunted,” Abby countered. In the few days since she’d closed on the place, she’d felt weird in this house and had heard what sounded like whispers and floors creaking. Shadows moved in her peripheral vision, but she’d never seen any definitive evidence that there were ghosts here. Like everyone else, she’d heard the rumors, so her imagination could very well have been working overtime, making her think that the house was more haunted than it actually was.
“I need to know if it’s a little haunted or majorly haunted and if the spirits here are dangerous. You know. Evil. Did I make a mistake buying this house?”
Abby wasn’t a huge fan of sharing her home with ghosts, but this house was an investment, a flip that she hoped to renovate and turn around in a few months. She’d paid a good amount of money for it, so ghosts or no ghosts, Abby had to see this through to the end.
“I tried burning sage like you told me,” Abby said, following Marlowe inside. “I don’t think it worked, though. How would I know if it did?”
Marlowe stopped after taking three steps inside, turned in a slow circle, and had a strange look on her face that set off a silent alarm in Abby.
“What?” Abby probed cautiously. “What is it?”
Marlowe might claim that she wasn’t psychic, but she was definitely sensitive to things that scared the shit out of everybody else.
“There are definitely spirits in this house,” she said, intensely studying the room.
Goose bumps erupted on Abby’s arms. “I knew it,” she murmured fearfully.
Yeah, she was scared, but she was also out a hell of a lot of money on this place. So, Abby willed her fear aside and grabbed hold of her practicality. “But are they good or bad, Marlowe?”
Marlowe held up a hand. “Give me a minute,” she snapped. “Discerning spirits ain’t easy, Abby.”
She took another couple of steps inside the living room, stopped again, and stared down at a particular spot on the floor.
Abby came over, stood beside her, and stared at the floor, too. “Do you see something?” she asked.
Marlowe shook her head. “I feel something,” she said introspectively. “Pain. Sadness. Anger.” Marlowe finally looked at Abby. “Love? Yes,” she quickly added. “Regret?”
Abby shrugged as if Marlowe had asked her a question. “I don’t know.”
Marlowe nodded. “Yes. It’s all of that. Passionate and desperate. Dangerous.”
That revelation sent a shiver up Abby’s spine, and her imagination started to run off into all kinds of directions. Rumor had it that some man had been murdered in this house by the daughter of his lover. But then other people said that his wife had shot him and blamed the other woman or her daughter or something like that.
“There’s a pattern, Abby,” Marlowe stated, concerned, making her way down the narrow hallway leading to the main bedroom at the end of it. She stopped along the way and looked into the only bathroom in the house and then into the other bedroom. “Something keeps repeating,” she continued. “Happening over and over again.”
“Like what?” Abby probed.
Marlowe shook her head in frustration. “I can’t … I don’t know. But something ain’t finished here.”
“What ain’t finished?” Abby whispered in awe. “Maybe if I know what it is, I can help to finish it.”
Now she really was starting to get scared. These dangerous and passionate spirits were living in her house. She’d seen enough horror mo
vies to wonder if there were bodies, actual bodies, hidden in this place, maybe under the floors, or even in the walls. What the hell had she gotten herself into?
Marlowe walked into the main bedroom. An old, dirty mattress lay on the floor, left behind from the most recent residents. In all the years the house had been vacant, people had come and gone, some in the middle of the night, in such a hurry to get out of this place that they didn’t even bother taking their belongings. Graffiti dirtied the walls. There were strange stains on the carpet that could’ve been anything. Holes had been punched through the drywall. Windows had been broken.
“Why the hell did you buy this place, Abby?” Marlowe asked, incredulous.
“It’s an investment,” Abby said, almost too terrified to speak but feeling like a fool as soon as she said it.
Marlowe tilted her head to one side as if she didn’t believe Abby’s explanation. That accusatory look of hers pressed down heavily on Abby.
“I liked the house,” she reluctantly admitted as if she were ashamed to say it out loud. “I don’t know. It’s a nice lot, and the house is quaint.” It was extremely small and quaint, swallowed up by the massive yard it sat on. “I don’t know, Marlowe. I just felt drawn to it. I have for a long time.”
Hearing herself say that out loud, Abby began to wonder if somehow the ghosts in this house had tricked her into buying it.
Marlowe studied Abby for a good, long time, so long that it made Abby even more nervous.
“You’re welcome here,” Marlowe finally said with a sigh. “No one else has been welcome here before you, so consider yourself fortunate.”
Abby’s eyes darted around the room. “So, they like me?”
Marlowe nodded. “I think they do.”
“Well, at least that’s something,” Abby said, relieved.
“I sense male and female energy. But mostly male.”
“But not evil?”
Marlowe shook her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she murmured. “Frustration. Angst. Desperation. I think all these things are coming mostly from him. But it could be her, too.”
Abby thought about it. “So, they’re trapped?”
Trapped ghosts. That couldn’t be good.
“They want something, Abby. They need it. They’re desperate for it—something or someone.”
Again, their eyes locked onto each other.
“Me?” Abby raised a pensive hand to her chest.
Marlowe took a deep breath. “I can’t be sure. It might not be a person at all. All I know about you is that they don’t mind you being here. They want you here.”
Marlowe walked past Abby and went back to the living room. “They both died here, but not together. I think it must be her sadness that I’m feeling and it’s his rage. He’s the angry one,” she said, sounding more definitive in her assumption.
“Did she kill him?”
“I can’t tell if she did or not. But the love is powerful. It’s thick and almost oppressive.”
“His or hers?”
“His, I think. Like he wasn’t ready to let go. To let her go.”
Passionate, angry lovers, trapped in her house, waiting on something—maybe Abby—maybe not.
“So, do you think they’d be all right with me renovating the place?”
Again, Abby had to be practical with all this, supernatural or not. After all, that’s why she’d bought it, and the sooner she could get busy working on it, the sooner she could be done and leave these ghosts to do whatever ghosts did. Abby had considered keeping the house and eventually moving in, but the thought of sharing this place with angry, passionate, sad, and obsessive ghost lovers was just not sitting well with her right now. Not that it would be fair to sell a haunted house to somebody else, either. But if she fixed it up, made the place nice again, maybe the ghosts would decide to leave or at least not scare people. It was just a theory on her part. One that she hoped could end up being true.
“I don’t think they’d mind,” Marlowe said with uncertainty. “I mean, if they like you, then I don’t see why not. Maybe you could come in and knock down a few walls and then see what happens.” She shrugged.
Abby nodded. That sounded reasonable. She’d start with something small like widening the passageway between the living room and main hall.
“But they want something,” Marlowe continued.
“You can’t tell what that is, though.”
Marlowe thought long and hard before finally responding. “If I had to guess, I’d say that maybe they’re still here because their story didn’t end the way it was meant to, the way they wanted it to. That’s how it is sometimes for ghosts. Spirits linger because their lives were cut short before they were ready.”
Okay, so having Marlowe come here was helpful to a point. At least Abby knew that she wasn’t crazy and that the house was haunted, but the ghosts liked her. Hopefully, they liked her enough to let her open up the space, maybe add a bay window, and put in some new flooring.
Neither of them heard the car pull up in front of the house. They didn’t even realize that someone else was in the yard at first.
“Fine.” Abby sighed. “So, I guess this is good and that maybe I didn’t waste my money after all. I might even be able to turn a profit on this place if I…”
“Oh, my damn goodness,” Marlowe muttered under her breath, staring at the screen door.
“What?” Abby asked, turning to see what Marlowe was looking at, or in this case, who. He was a god! Tall, swaggering, handsome. “Who’s that?” Abby asked, mesmerized. Her heart pounded like a drum beating in her chest.
“I have no idea—but the spirits in this house just exhaled, Abby.”
Some Kind of Madness
“EVERYBODY’S ALWAYS GOT A gotdamn opinion about me and what I do. I don’t give a damn about their opinions. I make my life. I live it how I want. I do what I want to do.”
* * *
Jordan walked up to that small, beige brick bungalow, hearing echoes of his father’s voice and half expecting to see Julian Gatewood coming out of that front door to the porch, greeting Jordan with that proud and defiant expression of his. Growing up, Jordan had both admired it and loathed it, but somehow, he knew that he’d inherited it. He and Julian had never been close, but the old man had always had a profound effect on Jordan whether he had intended to or not and whether Jordan wanted him to or not. Julian had died nearly thirty years ago, and Jordan had always thought that his father’s influence, the impact he’d made in Jordan’s life, had died with him. Lately, that didn’t seem to be the case. Something felt unresolved between them.
He’d been on his way to his ranch located just outside of Fort Worth, but instead of taking the exit to get to it, for some unknown reason, Jordan kept driving until he ended up here. In all the years since his father had been killed here, Jordan never once set foot in this house. He’d never even seen it in person. But lately, he’d been staring at it online. It had been on the market for months, maybe longer. Jordan’s fascination with the place didn’t start until after he was released from the hospital. His renewed interest in his father’s death didn’t start until then either, when it struck him how the shootings practically mirrored each other. Two women arguing, one man, and a bullet—or in his case, two.
The Julian Gatewood that Jordan had grown up with would never come to a place like this. This town, this house were insignificant for his father, and Julian never bothered with small things. The only version of him that Jordan had ever known was the version he’d grown up with in that Dallas mansion. There was another aspect of his father, one that he kept separate from his family and had stored away in this house. Without understanding why, Jordan was curious as to what would compel his father to spend so much time here away from that grand life he’d built for himself in Dallas. Could the reason have been as simple as a woman? Jordan shook his head slightly at the thought. He’d seen Ida Green, the woman his father had been having the affair with before his death. This was her house.
And she had been as insignificant as her property.
A car and a pickup truck were parked in the narrow driveway. Near the sidewalk was a “For Sale” sign, planted in the ground. The front door was open, and Jordan heard voices coming from inside. Just as he started to make his way up the stairs to the porch, a woman pushed open the screen door and stepped outside.
“May I help you?” she asked in an exaggerated Texas drawl, wrapping her mesmerizing lips around every syllable in dramatic fashion.
The two of them stared at each other. He’d never seen this woman before in his life, but for some reason, he couldn’t take his eyes off hers. Had he walked past her on the street, he probably wouldn’t have noticed her, and it would’ve been his loss. Pretty, dark skin. Exaggerated, dramatic, up-slanting eyes. Heart-shaped face. Those lips. Jesus! She wore loose-fitted jeans, low and beltless on her hips. Tiny waist. She was petite and, in her own way, curvy and flawless. Loose, natural curls framed her face, and a fitted white tank top filled with perfect breasts that dreams were made of.
He quickly attempted to compose himself.
“Are you lost?” she asked, interrupting his train of thought that had been uncharacteristically derailed.
“I saw the sign,” he said, quickly glancing at it. “I’d like to take a look at the property.”
There was something about that nervous look in her eyes, the shifting she did from one foot to the other—she was putting out a vibe, compelling and telling, without realizing it. She wanted him gone, which most certainly made him all the more curious about her and this place. Jordan had always relied heavily on his intuition when it came to people, and right now, he was able to read her like a book.
“I’m the owner,” she volunteered. “Closed on the place yesterday, Mr.…?”
“Tunson,” he said without hesitation, but unexpectedly. “Jordan Tunson.”
It felt right to use that last name, and it wasn’t a complete lie. Gatewood had adopted Jordan when he was two. Tunson was his birth name. If she knew the history of this house, then the name Gatewood would certainly draw more attention to him than he was interested in having at the moment.
