“I won’t let you make a mockery of her.” Shay shifted to face him and for a moment felt something like a zing when she looked into his whiskey-brown eyes.
“We won’t. I won’t. Whatever we find or don’t find here, it stays private unless your grandmother says otherwise,” he assured her.
“No.” She shot up off the bed. “No matter what, it stays private. I won’t let her life be turned upside down, or have people pointing and sniggering when she walks down the street. The evidence has to stay private.”
“Who are you more worried about? Her or you, Shay?”
Damn him for knowing too much. Why had she shared so many of her hopes, dreams and fears with him when they’d been together? Why couldn’t he stay where she’d left him? As a distant memory in her past.
“Truth? Both or us, Colin. I’ve got a great job over at Osprey Inn Kids Camp as the assistant director. I don’t think the parents would want some crazy woman who believes in ghosts taking care of their kids.”
“Okay.” He stood to look her in the eyes. “I’ll talk to the team, let them know your terms. We’re discreet and we’re not here to get our fifteen minutes. We just want answers.”
She wanted answers too, like what was he doing in Connecticut? The last she’d heard he’d been in Washington State, working at the Point Defiance Zoo. Was he on vacation or did he live here? Was it really coincidence or had her grandmother sought him out on purpose? She wouldn’t put it past Grammy to play matchmaker.
Shay held those questions in and instead answered his regarding the supposed paranormal activity.
“Where should I place the video cameras?” Colin asked as he looked around, checking angles.
“Anywhere my grandmother is.”
“Have you ever seen the ghost?” He asked it as if he’d asked if she’d seen an old friend or a rainbow.
“No, I’ve never seen O’Malley.” Except that one time. But she kept that information to herself.
It had been a couple of months after her grandfather had passed. She’d been asleep and then she wasn’t. She’d never figured out why she’d woken up when she did. There hadn’t been a noise or a shaking of the bed or anything, just a sense that she wasn’t alone. When she looked across the room her granddad was watching her.
A sense of peace and safety had wrapped around her. It was like being held one more time in his arms. Then she fell back asleep. He never said anything that night, nor did he come to Shay again, no matter how many times she begged him to visit her.
The more she thought about it and the older she got, she realized it had been nothing more than a dream. A grieving child’s way of coping with loss.
“Is this your room?” Colin’s question brought her back to the here and now.
“Yes.”
“Does it ever get unexplainably cold or does anything else unusual happen in here?” He looked around, but if he expected to find clues to the life she lived these days, they wouldn’t be here. Everything Shay owned was boxed up and sitting in the garage.
“No, not really. Grammy rarely comes upstairs and everything happens around her.”
“Kind of a small bed.”
“Fits my needs. . .for now.”
His eyes sparked with interest and the corners of his mouth tilted upward before he looked away.
He pulled a pair of dark-framed glasses from his front pocket and slipped them on before scrawling quick notes on a notepad.
Oh, now he was playing dirty.
She’d always been a sucker for a guy in frames, especially Colin.
Shay moved to the top of the stairs and waited while he took baseline temperatures of both rooms upstairs. He looked so serious as he pointed his infrared thermometer at the walls and wrote down the readings. Nothing else existed while he concentrated on the task at hand. It was one of the things about him she’d loved, his ability to ignore the world and focus—particularly when that focus was on her.
He asked a few more questions as they headed downstairs. He repeated the procedure in the master bedroom. She didn’t want to be in this room with him. The bed was bigger, twilight cast the room in a gentle, warm, rosy glow creating a romantic atmosphere. She recalled he had a fondness for making love to her in the afternoon. And remembering the moments spent in his arms was heating up areas like her cheeks and regions down south. Regions long overdue for a good workout.
“Do you need anything else?” Shay glanced at the partially opened door and back into eyes that expressed too much emotion. “I should get Gram to eat before you guys really get started.”
“No, I think that’s about it for. . .” Colin suddenly stopped and looked around. “Strange. I swear I just heard a man whisper.”
Chapter 3
Colin had to fight the urge to look over his shoulder. He had conducted numerous investigations over the past ten years and he’d yet to capture any real evidence of the paranormal. Tonight, might be the exception.
From the moment he’d crossed the threshold there had been something different, something unsettling about the atmosphere in Mrs. O’Malley’s house. Yeah, it would have been easy to blame it on the tension radiating off of Shay, but experience—with her moods—told him that wasn’t the cause. No, this was like bundled energy waiting to explode.
The rest of the team had noticed the buzz in the air and commented on it when they’d broken for dinner and regrouped at Elsie’s Diner after setting up their equipment. Upon their return, things had quieted down, until now.
Colin sat at the kitchen table, four monitors in front of him, with Shay at his side while the rest of the crew and her grandmother were in the master bedroom.
The time alone with her gave him a chance to study the woman he’d once planned to spend the rest of his days with. On the outside not much had changed. Her stormy blue eyes still took his breath away, and left him wondering what was going on in her brain. Her hair, black as midnight, fell in loose curls halfway down her back. The loose T-shirt did nothing to hide the soft curves and generous breasts she hated and he loved and the shorts she favored showed off her lightly tanned legs.
But the carefree girl he’d fallen in love with seemed to be missing. This Shay O’Malley was far too serious.
He looked around, double-checking that they were indeed alone.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“No, it’s. . . I don’t know. Probably nothing.”
“Why do we have to have the lights out? Grammy talks to O’Malley during the middle of the day.” She let out a sigh, but she didn’t fool him. The glow from the monitors allowed him to see everything in the room. She sat with her arms wrapped around her middle, her gaze landing anywhere but on him. Shay was nervous and that wasn’t something he’d expected.
“You’ve heard of an EMF—electromagnetic field—detector, right? We use them to tell when there’s a increase in the energy field. The theory is that spirits are energy, therefore if there’s a sudden spike it means you’ve got company. But electric lights put out energy too, so that gets in the way.”
“But you could do this during the day, right?” she persisted.