Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [10]
His friends and colleagues in Baton Rouge wouldn’t recognize him. Definitely the media wouldn’t. With a presence in newspapers across the country and a couple of bestselling books, he wouldn’t exactly call himself a celebrity…but people knew his name. The papers back home, at least, had gotten used to labeling him as a smooth, traveling playboy with a woman in every town he visited.
They’d probably gotten a lot of mileage out of Charleston. He’d bet the Fatal Attraction comments had been flying. Since he had avoided any hometown newspapers for the past few months, he could only surmise they’d had a field day with the fact that the reckless playboy had finally tangled with the wrong woman.
Oh, so very wrong.
“Thanks,” he finally said, forcing the memories away by sheer force of will. “I think.”
She laughed again. “Well, I mean, it is a good thing. You don’t look like him, and you sure felt hard.”
He did a quick mental check of his body’s reactions and realized she wasn’t far off the mark. Their close encounter had affected him more than he’d realized.
Clearing her throat nervously, she added, “I mean, you didn’t feel like a vapor or a cloud or anything. Stupid, I know, but I thought you were a ghost.”
A ghost. Hmm. Three months ago, yes, that would have sounded incredibly stupid to him. It didn’t so much now, though. Not after the things he’d seen and felt since moving here. Ghosts seemed as likely an explanation as anything else for the crazy things that had happened since he’d relocated to this tiny corner of Pennsylvania in an effort to escape his past.
Whenever he’d come to visit his uncle Roger at Seaton House before the man’s tragic, untimely death last June, he’d always loved the mysterious aura of the old hotel. His uncle used to talk about Seaton House’s dark, secretive past, and had promised to someday tell him about how it had come into the family a few generations before, through Simon’s great-grandfather.
He’d never dreamed that someday would never happen. That his uncle would be taken away so shockingly a few short weeks before Simon’s own world had gone to hell.
He sometimes wondered now, though, if he’d feel differently about this place if he knew whatever it was Roger had hinted about. Despite what guests would sometimes say, and the comments his uncle occasionally made about the place’s history, he’d always scoffed at the idea that anything supernatural was going on. Even having a home near New Orleans hadn’t made him a believer in the occult. But living here for three months…well, he wished he and his uncle could have had that conversation.
The brunette was watching, appearing almost tentative after her only half-joking admission that she thought he was a ghost. And he wasn’t about to add fuel to the fire of her imagination. He would never open his mouth about something as foolish as his occasional curiosity about whether his was the only spirit residing in Seaton House.
“Well, I’m not a ghost,” he said, beginning to stiffen and emotionally pull away in self-defense, as he had for the past several months. Now that she’d calmed down, and removed herself from the edge of the porch—and from him—he frowned and got back to the more pressing issue. “So, tell me, what are you doing here?”
Another splash of lightning made him realize she’d moved closer to the door and was, in fact, reaching for the knob. “I don’t recall inviting you in.” That didn’t appear to faze her. She pushed the door open and walked back into his house as if she belonged there.
She didn’t. He was meant to be alone. The last thing he needed was to do something stupid like letting his interest in a beautiful woman influence his actions. Wasn’t he still recovering from the wounds from the last time he’d let that happen?
Real annoyance began to crawl through him, his shoulders growing tight with tension. “Have you ever heard of respecting private property?” he asked as he followed