That Thing You Do (Whispering Bay Romance Book 1) (Volume 1) (14 page)

But what made the whole thing worse, was that she knew
he
was thinking about it, too. She wasn’t some naïve eighteen-year-old virgin anymore. She was a thirty-year-old woman and she knew when a man wanted to have sex with her. And it wasn’t just because they were alone and she was seemingly available.

She’d seen the way Tom looked at her when he didn’t think she was watching.
The way his voice went husky when she got too close. The hitch in his breath whenever they accidentally touched. It would be so easy to reach over and scratch her twelve-year-itch. She was single. He was single now, too.

It would be the epilogue to a sad story. Sure. There wouldn’t be a happily-ever-after, but both parties would leave with all unresolved business concluded.

The End.
No chance for a sequel.
Ever
.

She was tempted. She really was. But everything inside her screamed that it would be disastrous because, despite the fact that it had been twelve long years, somehow (
unbelievably
), they were still connected. And not just on a physical level. Yes, there was that, certainly. But if it was only a physical thing then it would be easy to walk away and never think
about him again.

She didn’t want to know what Tom Donalan was thinking and she didn’t want him knowing what she was thinking, either. Yet, here they were lying next to each other and they were doing just that. It was like they were having some sort of weird brain sex.

“Stop it,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“You know. That
thing
you do.”

He didn’t ask her to elaborate and
she didn’t volunteer anything more. Instead, she shuffled back to the edge of the mattress. Ghost or no ghost, Allie couldn’t wait for morning to arrive.

I
n her dream she
was cold and it was so real she could actually feel herself shivering. Then something wrapped itself around her and the cold disappeared. She snuggled closer to the warmth. There was a hint of whiskey and something else—something familiar she hadn’t tasted in ages but suddenly craved more than air itself. She opened her mouth, wanting more. A tongue, hot and aggressive, met
hers in an urgent kiss. A large hand snaked beneath her T-shirt and cupped her breast, teasing her nipple into a tight bud.

Oh, so it was
that
kind of dream.

She sighed and shifted her legs, only to encounter something hard and unyielding. It took Allie a few seconds to realize what it was.

A boner—the size of Texas—pressed against her lower abdomen.

If you were going to
have a fantasy you might as well go for the gold.

She rubbed herself against the imaginary erection, eliciting a moan. Only the moan wasn’t hers. It came from somewhere close, next to her ear. “
Damn
, Allie,” whispered a dark voice. A voice that sounded suspiciously like…

Her eyes flew open. No, no, no! This wasn’t happening. She shoved Tom off and rolled out from beneath him.

“
Hel-lo
! Can you please tell me what that was all about?” She struggled to catch her breath.

Tom sat up and shook his head as if to clear it. He looked as disoriented as Allie felt. “All I know is that I was innocently sleeping when I woke up to find you kissing me.”

“I wasn’t kissing
you.
You were kissing
me
!”

He grinned, all lazy and smug looking. “I was kissing you all by myself?”

“Yes, absolutely. I didn’t participate in the least.” It sounded dumb, even to her. She ran a shaky hand through her hair. She probably looked a mess. Not that she should give a rat’s ass what she looked like. Except she did. Dang it. “Okay, so I thought I was dreaming,” she said in her defense.

“You dream about me?”

“Ha! Hardly. You were the one dreaming about me.”

“You
were shivering so I wrapped my arms around you to keep you warm. End of story. Can I help it if you took advantage of my chivalrous nature?”

She shook her head. “What are you so happy about?”

“The hell if I know.” He stood and stretched his arms above his head.

 Allie tried to ignore the way his biceps bulged and how deliciously sexy he looked with stubble covering his jaw. He
turned and caught her peeking. She quickly looked away. Pockets of sunshine streamed through the closed windows. 

Wait
. It was morning? She had planned to take another walk through the senior center with her ghost detector. How could she have slept through the night when her entire career hinged on this story? Maybe if she hurried, there would still be time for one last walk through.

“So do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” she asked. Although she knew perfectly well what he wanted to discuss. “That kiss was a freak one-time occurrence. Never to be repeated again. You have your life and I have mine. Right?”

His jaw tightened. “If you say so.”

“PEOPLE, STAY OFF THE SIDEWALK!” boomed a voice from outside.

 Tom and Allie stared at each
other in confusion, then he walked over to the front door and swung it open, letting in a flood of light. With a determined stride he took off for the parking lot. Allie instinctively ran after him.

The scene in front of them was chaos.

Like yesterday morning there were workmen and machines everywhere, but unlike yesterday morning there was a crowd gathered in the parking lot. They
held signs and walked around in a circle.

“Keep the ghost alive!” yelled an elderly gentleman wearing a Gray Flamingos T-shirt. Viola, Gus, and at least a dozen other seniors marched alongside him.

There was another group, as well. A much younger, all female group, that Allie instantly recognized as Mimi’s Bunco group, the Bunco Babes.

She also recognized Tom’s foreman. He stood
at the edge of the crowd with a bullhorn in his hands. “People! We need you to clear the premises. This building is scheduled to come down and we don’t want anyone to get hurt!”

Tom took the bullhorn away from Hard Hat. “I got this, Keith.”

“I did the best I could, Tom, but…” Keith raised his arm to blot the sweat dripping down his forehead, “they just keep coming!”

“What are
all these people doing here?” Allie asked.

Keith turned to glare at her as if to say YOU. “I should have known it would be the Flaky Biscuit. Were you the one responsible for setting up this little protest?”

Tom’s gaze flew to her face. Accusation and something else shone in his eyes. Something that looked suspiciously like hurt. Which was ridiculous. Tom Donalan didn’t do hurt. He
inflicted it.

“
Me
? No, I mean, I did ask the Gray Flamingos for help, but that was yesterday morning before I knew I was going to spend the night here. I had no idea they would organize anything like this.”

Allie couldn’t tell whether or not he believed her. “I’m going to make sure the equipment is secured before someone gets hurt.” He signaled to Keith and both men took off toward
one of the construction trailers.

 Allie was about to follow as well when Mimi’s friend Pilar stopped her. Her short dark hair was pulled back in a headband and her brown eyes were flushed with excitement. “Long time no see!” she said, wrapping Allie up into a hug. “I hear you’re joining us for Bunco this week.”

“Bunco? Um, yeah, maybe. What’s going on here? How did all this happen?”

“Mimi initiated the Bunco phone chain and filled us in on this ghost situation,” Pilar said. “As the city’s attorney, I can’t officially protest. Conflict of interest, and all that. But you have to admit, this is pretty exciting.”

“Mimi helped organize this?”

“Along with the Gray Flamingos, of course. That’s quite an email if you ask me. You really don’t know who sent it?”

“You read the anonymous email?”

“Viola forwarded it to the rest of the Gray Flamingoes, my parents included, who forwarded it on to me. As you can see, word spreads fast in Whispering Bay.” Pilar studied the building with renewed interest. “I knew the center had been vandalized a few times, but a
ghost
taking up residence? Do you think it’s for real?”

“Oh, it’s real all right,”
said a voice that could only come from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.

Allie whipped around to find herself face to face with a tall, thin woman in her late sixties. It only took her a couple of seconds to realize who was standing in front of her. “You must be Phoebe Van Cleave.”

“In the flesh,” Phoebe croaked.

“What’s going on? I figured when you didn’t call me back
that you weren’t interested in my ghost story.”

 “Not interested? Are you kidding? I got sidetracked by the Dolphin Ghost, which turned out to be nothing but a big fake.” Her face crinkled in disgust. “But don’t worry, I plan to give this ghost one hundred percent of my full attention. My people are here now. That’s what counts. And this building isn’t going anywhere.”

Roger Van Cleave
walked up holding a homemade sign that read GIVE THE DEAD A CHANCE. “It’s just like the good old days, huh?”

Allie frowned. “The good old days?”

“The sixties. Vietnam. Flower Power.” Phoebe shook her fist high in the air to accentuate her point. “You’re too young to understand but that’s the beauty of this great country. If you don’t like something, then protest the hell out of it.”

“Um, yeah, okay, I read about the sixties.”

“So, what happened last night? Did you make contact?” Phoebe asked.

The only contact Allie had made was the kiss-that-shouldn’t-have-been. She felt her face go warm. “Honestly, Ms. Van Cleave? Not a whole lot happened.” Allie briefly thought about mentioning the ghost detector app, but Phoebe was a professional and Allie didn’t want
to come off amateurish. But the lemons…could it mean something? “I did smell this lemon odor. Twice now. And there was this warm fuzzy kind of feeling. But that’s it.”

“Lemons? This isn’t a potpourri shop.” Phoebe looked her over like a bug she wanted to squash. “Could be you and the ghost aren’t simpatico.”

“Could be there’s no ghost at all and this whole thing has been some elaborate
prank.” She’d said it to get Phoebe’s goat, but Allie had to start facing facts. She’d never really believed there was a ghost, but she’d hoped there would be
something
to write about. Something spooky or unexplained that she could milk into an article. But the whole thing was looking like nothing more than a dead end.

Phoebe planted her fists on her bony hips and glared at her. “No wonder
he hasn’t responded to you. You’re a
non-believer
, aren’t you?”

Allie sighed. She didn’t need this. Not now. What she needed was… “Wait. What do you mean
him
?”

“Oh, whoever’s haunting this place is definitely male. I’m getting an unusually high testosterone vibe.” She raised her palm in the air like she was touching something and closed her eyes in concentration. When she opened her
eyes again there was a serene, almost taunting look in them. “You really can’t feel it?”

Allie couldn’t feel the ghost vibe but she could definitely feel the testosterone aura. And it wasn’t friendly. She turned around to find Tom staring down at her.

“Can I speak to you? In private?” he asked.

“
Well
, I think I know where that warm and fuzzy feeling is coming from,” Phoebe mocked.
She waved them away. “You two lovebirds go on. I’m just going to have a word with my people.”

“Oh, we aren’t together,” Allie said, but Phoebe had already taken off into the crowd.

Tom’s expression was unreadable. “We can’t do the demolition with all these people here. Can you get them to leave?”

“I’ll try. But that crowd looks pretty determined. I’m not sure they’ll listen to
anything I have to say.”

“Then try hard,” he shot back.

Unbelievable.
He did think this was all her fault! Which, it sort of was, she supposed, but his attitude was unfair. Just like him, she’d only been doing her job.

“Look, Donalan, I didn’t go back on my word. Yes, I did contact these people to see what they knew about the ghost rumors, but I didn’t ask them to show up here
this morning. I really expected this building to come down today.”

He studied her face like he was trying to figure something out, then slowly nodded. “If you say you didn’t organize this, then I believe you.”

Relief, simple and sweet, flooded her insides. It shouldn’t matter what he thought, but it did. Allie didn’t want to begin to think what that might mean. She took the bullhorn
out of his hands. “I can’t promise they’ll leave, but I’ll do my best.”

Allie prepared herself to face the crowd. There were more people now than there’d been fifteen minutes ago. Besides the Bunco Babes and the Gray Flamingos there were at least ten people wearing Sunshine Ghost Society T-shirts, as well as an assortment of on-lookers.

“We’ve called in the troops from Panama City,”
Phoebe said, seeing her look of astonishment. “It’s barely even eight and we already have almost forty people here. Should have another couple dozen by ten.”

“Troops? As in…the military?”

“No, silly, the rest of the Sunshine Ghost Society.”

“How many of you people are there?”

“A hundred, as of last count.”

“A hundred!”

Phoebe nodded proudly. “Of course, not
all of us are official investigators. Most are associate members and they’re hoping to get their first glimpse at a real honest to goodness ghost. A sighting could take them to the next level of our organization.”

“What? Like a merit badge? Good luck with that because this is one shy ghost,” Allie muttered.

“As I’ve said, the ghost is searching for a kindred spirit. Someone who’ll
be open to listening to whatever it is he needs to tell us. Obviously, that person isn’t you.”

Be polite, mi amor,
Buela’s voice whispered in her ear. Allie suppressed a shiver. Her grandmother’s voice was always somewhere in the back of her head, but that bit of advice had sounded eerily real. As if Buela really were standing next to her.

“Well, here’s the thing, Ms. Van Cleave, I
truly do appreciate the effort you’ve made. Coming out here like this and all. But the building has to come down today, so I’m going to have to ask you and your group to clear the premises.”

Phoebe searched Tom out with her gaze. “Gone over to the other side, have you? Not that I blame you. Your boyfriend’s mighty nice to look at but I can’t be swayed by a pair of pretty blue eyes and a
tight set of buns. No, ma’am, this is serious work we’re looking at.”

“I already told you, he’s not my boyfriend.” Her protest only seemed to amuse Phoebe. Allie wished she could wipe the obnoxious grin off the woman’s face. “Maybe the ghost’s spirit will be dislodged during the demolition,” Allie said, grasping at straws. “I’ve been in this building two nights now and pretty much nothing
has happened. Maybe the ghost just needs a push in the right direction to make himself known.”