I frowned.
“With the detective.”
I was still confused. It was October. Not a good time for swimming.
“Raye, sometimes I worry about you.”
“Sometimes I worry about me too.” I drank. The wine was nearly half gone. Damn.
“You’re twenty-seven and still a virgin.”
Suddenly I understood her reference to “the plunge,” and I nearly complimented her clever euphemism. But that would only encourage her.
“I am not!”
“Once doesn’t count,” Jenn said.
“Technically, it does.”
Even without the oversharing on the part of that eternal ass, Jordan Rosholt—whoops, guess I’d named him—the incident hadn’t been intriguing enough to repeat. It had been awkward, uncomfortable, and other words I didn’t want to think about let alone do. But, as Jenn had told me the single time I’d discussed it, we must not have been doing it right. I didn’t know there was a wrong way, but then I didn’t know much.
“The detective is into you,” she continued. “Or…” She waggled her eyebrows. “He wants to be.”
Apparently she needed no encouragement.
“Who says I’m into him?”
“You’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumbass not to be.” She drained her glass. “And if you don’t tap that, I will.”
The idea of Jenn sleeping with Bobby Doucet bothered me more than it should. I had no claim on the man, even if I had seen him first.
Still, he had run straight toward danger at my request. Not that there’d been any danger, but he hadn’t known that at the time.
Jenn set her glass on the coffee table. “You haven’t had a date in nine months.”
“Ten,” I corrected.
“But who’s counting?”
“It’s not like one of the guys I’ve known all my life is suddenly going to become more appealing.” Or learn how to keep his big mouth shut.
“But, Raye,” Jenn said in a far too reasonable voice that set my teeth on edge, “the detective isn’t from here.”
She made an excellent point. One I considered further while I finished my wine.
It seemed a bit cold-blooded to sleep with a man just because he was from out of town.
Then again … I didn’t think he’d mind.
*
The spirit of Henry Taggart hovered in the darkness outside Raye’s childhood home.
He and Prudence had crumbled to ashes in Roland’s witch pyre, then no doubt been scattered to the breeze. Who knew? Who cared?
Their spell had fanned the flames; the sacrifice of their lives had fueled their magic. Their daughters had been saved.
Centuries had passed in an instant. Henry had opened his eyes and seen the eldest of his three daughters, a baby in a crib, babbling to the corner. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that she’d been babbling to him.
At first he’d wanted to speak to her, to tell her who he was, who she was. But she’d been too young to comprehend, and as time went on and he’d observed the world she was in, he’d decided that remaining silent was for the best. Perhaps, if they were very, very lucky, he’d never have need to speak to her at all.
For her sake, he probably should have remained invisible too, but there were times he just had to see her, and when he did she always saw him.
Seeing ghosts in this world wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as it had been in his. She wouldn’t burn for it. But it still marked her as strange in a place and time where no one wanted to be. Really, had there ever been a time when anyone wanted to be strange?
Leaves rustled, the foliage stirred, and a great, black wolf emerged from the forest to stand at his side.
“Darling,” Henry murmured.
Sweetheart.
Pru, through virtue of her affinity with animals, had been reborn in this world as a wolf. Henry assumed his affinity with ghosts was the reason he was one.
His wife now communicated with him through some form of telepathy. He heard her thoughts, and despite her being a wolf, she understood everything he said.
When he’d first become aware that he’d traveled through time, he’d been afraid he had done so alone. But within days—maybe weeks or months, time was odd when one was a specter—Pru had joined him in her present form. They both bore the brand that Roland McHugh had left on them. Henry’s was hidden by the high neck of his coat, Pru’s by the thickness of hers.
She was still beautiful; he still loved her, he wouldn’t, couldn’t stop. However, Henry couldn’t say he wasn’t disappointed that they weren’t the same, be they both ghosts or wolves. But when dealing with powerful witchcraft, time travel, life after death, one took what one was dealt and was thankful for it.
Pru had opened her eyes and seen their middle daughter—a child with an affinity for animals just like Pru. Henry, the ghost, had come to Raye. Neither one of them had any idea where their third daughter had landed, and it bothered them. Now that Raye was in danger it bothered them a lot.
“How is she?” he asked.
The same. Safe for now. And here?
“The same,” he answered. “Safe no longer.”