by Taylor Hart
“Whatever.” With a grunt, he reached out and tickled her. “I saved you from plenty of robbers in the middle of the night.”
Her mind flitted to how often she’d texted him to do a perimeter check around her house if her parents were gone and she was alone late at night. She sighed. “You always came to check the house for me if my parents weren’t home. I never thanked you for that.”
“Don’t get soft on me now, Charles.”
“Fine,” she said, and she snapped her fingers. “I bet fans of Aquaman don’t know about his fear of ghosts.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “We could do a ghost hunt and have Paul record it.”
Scrunching up his nose, Ziggy grinned. “I’m sure it won’t top all the other highlights from this trip, starting with the ‘reveal’ at the prison about us.”
That dampened her spirits a little. The whole miserable scene would be in the stupid documentary. “Yeah.”
He kissed her lips before pulling back and letting out a breath. “We’d better cool the jets, pizza girl, and get inside.”
She laughed. “I don’t care for that nickname.”
“Too bad.” He linked their hands. “You tease me about ghosts, I tease you about your consumption of pizza, remember?”
It was funny to her that they were jogging toward the house, giggling like schoolkids. Somehow, staying in a haunted mansion seemed kinda fun.
The door was open, and the lights had turned on. As they entered, Sophia was impressed. The place had been kept up well. It had a huge ornate crystal light fixture in the center of a large, sweeping entryway. Enormous landscapes in silver frames hung on the walls, and the staircase going up to the second floor was equally fancy.
“Check it out back here!” Ty called out.
She felt Ziggy tense as they walked into the unlit living room, but the light was on in the kitchen on the other side. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” His jaw was tight.
She felt a thrill at being with Ziggy again. “You’re terrified.”
He gently tapped her nose. “You’re happy.”
She swiped at his hand. “So are you.”
He wagged his eyebrows dramatically as they entered the kitchen, which didn’t disappoint. It was older but retrofitted. Pots and pans hung above the kitchen on a wooden support. There were floor-to-ceiling windows and a large cove-type space with a candlelit table.
Ty and Paul were sitting there, staring out the window. The moon was bright, and she could see an English-style garden.
Ty grinned at them. “Mr. Baxter, who descends from the original family, is coming here now to give us more instructions.” Ty pointed to a smaller house toward the east side of the property. “He owns the place and rents it out. He also maintains it.”
“Cool.” Ziggy kept her hand, tugging her closer to him.
Ty held Ziggy’s eyes for a second, then nodded.
Paul was filming, of course.
Ziggy cleared his throat. “So we shouldn’t see ghosts, right?”
Sophia wanted to laugh at the clear discomfort on Ziggy’s face, but she held it in.
Ty looked giddy, pointing everything out to Paul to record. “Check out the English-type garden. Oh my gosh, we need to go run through there!”
It wasn’t long before Mr. Baxter knocked on the back door before coming in. “Hello.”
Ty jumped up to meet him, and they all trailed behind him. “Hi, sir.”
Mr. Baxter greeted them all, then slowly looked around the kitchen. “I wouldn’t recommend cooking. Are you planning on cooking?”
Ty looked surprised and backed up as Mr. Baxter entered. “I don’t think so.”
“We don’t have to,” Sophia added. They would be rafting all day, but they could order in or go out.
“Good.” Mr. Baxter frowned. “It attracts the ghosts, you see.”
The place got really quiet. All of them froze.
Mr. Baxter stared at the oven. “My great-great-grandma died in a kitchen fire, ya know.”
Ty’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard that.”
The old man’s face stretched into a grin, and he pointed finger guns at Ty. “Got ya.”
Ty broke out into nervous laughter, and the others joined in.
Mr. Baxter moved toward the basement. “Naw, nothing of the sort happened, but the other stories online are true.” He threw back the door and flipped on a light. “I need to show you where the pilot light is at. Sometimes, it goes out and the place gets real cold. You can call me, but if it goes out in the middle of the night, maybe you could just light it.”
Sophia walked in front of Ziggy down the stairs, and a creepy chill washed over her. The basement was dark and damp and had a bunch of old stuff.
Mr. Baxter went to the center of the room and tugged on a string. The light clicked on, revealing a bunch of old dolls staring back at them from a shelf. Ziggy actually jumped.
Mr. Baxter nodded to the dolls. “Chucky effect, right?”
Sophia covered her face to stifle a laugh.
Ty laughed too, pointing to Ziggy. “Dude, you should have seen your face.”
Paul chuckled behind the camera. “I got it. This is great.”
Ziggy glowered at them all.
Mr. Baxter moved to a heater and dropped to his knees, pointing beneath it. “Right there. If it goes out, just grab this box of matches and light it.” There were matches on a small shelf next to it. He got up and showed them how to do it.
After they went back upstairs, listening to Mr. Baxter’s renditions of different ghost sightings, Ziggy tugged Sophia with him back to the front. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Baxter. Ty, we’ll get the bags.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mr. Baxter called out.
Sophia couldn’t stop giggling or smiling the whole time she helped Ziggy get the bags and bring them inside. “You couldn’t take anymore.”
He grinned at her, taking every chance he got to stop walking and kiss her. “Maybe I just wanted to alone with you.”
They trudged up the stairs, where there were four bedrooms. Ziggy perfunctorily checked each room and plunked a bag down. When they got to the master room, he hesitated. “Yours.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Or we could share?”
She laughed and put her bag on the bed, liking the pastel blue colors of the room. The wallpaper was faded, but the bed was soft. There was a brown leather couch and dresser on one side of the room. Uneasily, she said, “Zig, just because everything was cleared up, it doesn’t mean we’re going to share a bed.”
He blatantly eyed her up and down. “I guess you’re not that kind of girl. You never were.”
Her cheeks burned. “Nope.”
His eyes holding hers, and he looked like he would devour her. He made no bones about reeling her in and kissing her. “If I remember right,” he said in between kisses, “you could never get enough of kissing me.”
She giggled, feeling like she was a teenager again.
Pulling back, he grinned down at her. “This is crazy, isn’t it? Because I … I just feel like I’m eighteen again.” He cleared his throat. “Before I thought you broke my heart.”
Her sensible side took over, and she pulled back too. “Ziggy, I have all of those feelings. I do, but we have to be careful.”
“I’m glad you have them, too. And no, we don’t.” He put his hand on her waist, bringing her closer.
She could so easily get lost in this man, in the way he knew her. In the way she knew him. Their lives had taken such a stark turn when they’d realized the truth a couple of hours ago.
“Then we’re clear?” he asked.
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Clear about what?”
He wiggled his brows, and she noticed a scar on his left eyebrow. She wasn’t sure where it was from. “About the fact that we’re together again,” he said, as if it was as obvious as the earth and moon circling the sun.
Butterflies swarmed in her stomach. “Ziggy, I was … I thought I wou
ld get engaged a couple of days ago, remember?”
Stealing a kiss, he pushed her hair off of her neck and nuzzled her shoulder. “So you’ve said.”
Frustration coursed through her, and she pulled back. “Ziggy.”
An innocent look washed over his face. “What?”
“You act like we haven’t lived for ten years.” Her mind whirled with everything she’d been thinking as she drove. “I went to NYU. You went to Miami. Then I went to London and you came back to Denver. I had boyfriends, and I’m sure you had girlfriends.”
“So?”
It bugged her he was acting so cavalier about all of that. “So maybe we should get to know each other better before we act like we’re eighteen and right out of high school again.”
“Same Soph.” He tapped his temple. “Still think too much.”
She was baffled. “Don’t you? Don’t you wonder what my boyfriends were like? What my almost fiancé was like?”
This put him out of his easy mood. He crossed his arms. “You don’t think I know about those boyfriends? You don’t think my mother didn’t tell me everything you were doing?”
“She did?” Of course, her mother had always slipped in things about Ziggy or the other brothers, but they were women.
“Until I finally had to tell her to quit.” He moved to the window that overlooked the garden in the back. “She would still get it in. Every time you moved, any project you were working on, she would just mention that you’d taken a job or what your mom had said about a certain guy.” He spun back to her. “Believe me, Marshall was the worst to hear about.”
She’d had to tell her mother to stop too. She moved to the window and looked down at the garden and its high bushes. “It really does look Englishy, doesn’t it?”
He grinned, and with his finger he traced which pathway would get him to the end.
She watched for a minute, seeing that he’d gotten out of the maze.
“What?”
She grinned at him, taking his hand. “Nothing. You just always do that.”
“Do what?”
“When you’re focused, you can just tune everything else out and zero in. You did it even as kids if you were figuring something out.” She leaned into him. “I used to watch you play, and I’d see how you would calculate what defense would break through, how to stop them, and how to protect the QB. You’re really good, by the way.”
His face lit up. “You think?”
She laughed. “Like you don’t know, Aquaman.”
He lifted his other hand and traced the line of her face from her cheekbone to her jaw. “I’m good at a lot of things.”
The intensity ratcheted up between them. “Zig, slow down.”
He ran his thumb across her lips, studying them. “You think I liked thinking about you not in my life?”
She let the rhetorical question pass, and her eyes teared up. She’d badly missed him too.
“You think—” He moved his eyes to hers. “—it didn’t about kill me all these years not having you?”
The moment came to a screeching halt, and she thought about how brokenhearted she’d been for so long. She’d never quit being broken. “I get what Marshall was saying now.”
His eyes fluttered and he took a step back. “What?”
“The night I thought Marshall would propose, he told me that I had basically made up this idea that he wanted to marry me and have a family with me. The truth is that I never felt like I could be over you without marrying someone else because … because I was broken.” She nodded, suddenly understanding herself. “Because what you and I had was pure and passionate, and it was easy to see myself as a mother and wife and by your side.” Tears washed down her face—she’d been mourning what she’d lost and never truly realized it.
He moved to hug her, but she put up her hand and continued. “Marshall was a passionate man, but what I see now is that there was never ‘passion’ between us. Not …” She broke off, thinking of how she felt every time Ziggy touched her.
In one swift motion, his lips were back on hers. Flames burned into her, and she fanned them with years of locked-away fuel.
Ziggy pulled them to the bed, and before she knew it they were making out, his hands pulling her closer, hers running through his hair. She could give herself to him. It would be impossible not to show him how she felt through physical contact.
Out of nowhere he stopped, jerking upright. “We can’t do this. I … I don’t want to mess anything up between us.” He took her hand, tugging her off the bed but keeping her against him. His eyes shone back at her. “I can recite for you exactly which boyfriend you had in each town you were in. I can tell you about your jobs. Oh, that one with the snotty professor at Oxford who hit on you really ticked me off. Had to hit the bag for an hour after Mom told me about him.”
She laughed, simultaneously surprised and sad that he knew so many things. “We go from full-out make-out to talking about my exes?”
He grinned. “It cooled us off.”
“Nice tactic.” She grunted, holding to him. “Thank you.”
He nodded.
She shifted back. “I hated Vivian,” she said, referring to the doctor he’d dated for a couple of years here in Denver.
His eyebrows lifted. “I thought she might be the one, but it didn’t work out.”
“Why?”
Hesitating, he kissed her lightly, flooding her veins with flame. His hand ran down her neck, shoulder, and arm, lighting little fires wherever he touched. He moved to her ear. “Because she wasn’t you.”
She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe they could just dive back in, but … could she?
Releasing a breath, he took a step back, then flexed his hands and started toward the door. “It’s alright, Soph, because guess what?”
She didn’t want to him leave, but she didn’t want to seem so needy and indecisive—one moment, she was telling him she couldn’t do it, and the next, she wanted him to come back. “What?”
“In case you didn’t know, this is the No Regrets Tour. So I’m going to personally make sure we have no regrets from anything.” He rushed back, kissing her gently one more time.
She laughed, feeling happier than she felt in so long. She put her fist up in the air. “Sounds good. No regrets.”
Chapter 14
The next evening, Ziggy stared across the dinner table at Sloane Kent’s house and found himself laughing with the whole group: himself, Soph, Ty, Paul, and a mixed crew of famous people. Obviously, there was Sloane Kent, the country star Ty had opened for during the past six months, and his wife, Hope. There was Cameron Cruz, owner of the Storm, who had surprised them all and come up with his new wife, Isabel. There was one couple Ziggy hadn’t known before, friends of Cameron Cruz’s—a man named Hunter James, an apparent bazillionaire from what everyone said around the table, and his wife, Summer. Hunter had just told a story about winning his property in a poker game, and Ziggy still didn’t know whether the man was telling the truth or not.
The day had been filled with breakfast downtown and meandering through the shops while Ty and Paul filmed everything. He and Soph had taken it slow, talking and laughing and getting to know each other again. It was just as he’d suspected—he still loved her. Madly. Deeply. Now he loved her even more, because he knew that she never would have dumped him. She was so beautiful and funny and good. He listened to her talk about all these people and organizations she’d helped raise money for, and she mentioned that she still kept in contact with different clients.
He laughed with the group as they talked about rafting the next day and the possible graffiti art on top of Devil’s Tower, which he still wasn’t sure about. Looking around, all he knew was how much he wanted Soph next to him every day for the rest of his life.
The evening had been wonderful with an amazing meal and fun chatter and jokes, but it was winding down. There was a moment of silence, and then Sloane lifted his drink and held it in the air. “Ty, I’
m thinking that should be the title of your next album, don’t you?”
“No more albums.” Ty’s face held disdain.
No one had spoken of Ty doing his music since the diagnosis. Ziggy wondered why.
Sloane looked confused, then resigned. “Okay.”
Soph lifted her glass. “I think an album would be awesome. All proceeds could go to ALS.”
“Sorry. I can’t focus on that.” Ty met Sloane’s eyes, then leaned back in his chair. “I need to focus on dying.”
Ziggy scowled at him.
Ty met his gaze and snapped his fingers. “I mean living. Big bro doesn’t like it when I say dying, do you?”
Ziggy didn’t comment. He ordered himself to keep his cool.
Ty sighed, lifting and lowering a hand. “But it’s all good.” He said it in a strange way, the way a rapper would say it. He turned to Sophia. “I have had the chance to fix past mistakes, right?”
Soph didn’t respond, either. Everyone at the table was quiet, as if sensing that Ty’s behavior was off.
Ty lifted his chin toward Hunter. “You should climb Devil’s Tower with us. I think I’m going to do graffiti art in the form of a blue whale.” He laughed and turned to Ziggy. “Like Ahab and his whale. Remember when Mom made us read that book?”
Ziggy grunted, trying to be normal, to keep this thing with Ty normal. “Yeah.”
“Your mother made you read certain books?” Hope asked.
Ty nodded.
“That’s a good idea,” Summer said, nudging Hunter. “We should make Cade read that book.”
Hunter looked uneasy. “Uh, yeah, as long as the whole family doesn’t have to do it.”
She scowled at him.
Everyone laughed, and the air seemed to clear.
Sloane cleared his throat. “You sure you don’t want to record?” he asked again as he lifted his water glass and took a sip.
“No,” Ty said sharply. He let out a breath and put both of his hands on the table. “No singing. No album. I’m dying, in case you haven’t heard. Dy-ing, people! No time to work, just time to die.” With an awkward laugh, he slapped the table. “I mean live.”
