Betrayal - By Lee Nichols Page 0,6
secret all those years. You’ll shortly be receiving your nomination for Best Parenting award in the mail. Oh, wait, I don’t have your address.
Anyway, I’d crumpled the photo before Bennett saw it, but I still worried about it. Anatole’s comment made me wonder if I was supposed to mistrust Bennett because he worked for the Knell. Is that what my parents meant? Or did they know something about Bennett that, as usual, they weren’t telling me? And did I even care what they thought?
Bennett downed the popover in three bites, then pressed his hands together in a praying motion and bowed to Anatole, which I thought was nice.
He turned to me. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah,” I said, then remembered: “Oh no, my coat.” Still covered in grave muck.
It iz cleaned and in ze front hall, Celeste said.
I couldn’t hug her without suffering from ghostly frostbite, so I blew a kiss and followed Bennett to the front door.
Watching him carry my suitcase to the car, I couldn’t help but remember that the last time we’d gone on a trip together, I’d ended up three thousand miles from home, seeing ghosts, and battling wraiths. I hoped this journey wasn’t quite so life changing.
It was a thirty-minute trip to the train station in Boston. Enough time for me to simply enjoy riding around in a car with my boyfriend. I could get used to this.
Ten minutes out of Echo Point, we passed a little shack with a giant, hand-painted ice cream cone bolted to its side. “They make the best ice cream,” Bennett said.
The window was shuttered, and it looked as though they hadn’t served ice cream for months. “If it’s so good, how come they went out of business?”
“They’re just closed for the season. Come Memorial Day, I promise I’ll take you there.”
I tried not to get too excited at the idea of a future together. “Nothing ‘closes for the season’ in San Francisco. There’s only foggy and less foggy. People eat ice cream in both conditions.”
“The weather is awesome here in the summer.” Bennett glanced at me. “Do you like to sail?”
“Um …” I’d actually never been on any boat other than a ferry, but picturing me and Bennett out on a little sailboat in Echo Point harbor was about as romantic as I could dream. “Yeah. I like it a lot.”
He smiled. “Good. Because we have a boat. And you and I are on it all summer.”
We passed a stretch of ocean on the left. I gazed out at it, longing for summer. Crystal blue water and warm air caressing my skin. Or maybe by then it would be Bennett caressing me. “Will we ever have to come back to shore?”
“Not if we don’t want to.” He gazed at me hungrily and I tried not to blush.
His look gave me goose bumps and I crossed my arms to keep from shivering. It all seemed so impossible, but a girl could dream. “Sounds like heaven.”
We left the Land Rover in long-term parking at the station and caught the bullet train to New York. We sat in plush first-class seats, courtesy of Bennett’s family money, and a waiter brought snacks and drinks. They didn’t have chai, so I settled for an English Breakfast tea with milk in a cute little plastic teacup, and watched the scenery as we glided down the track.
It was painful, sitting so close to Bennett. He was wearing a navy linen button-down that made his eyes seem almost too blue. I found it hard to focus on what he was saying when I looked straight into them. The problem was, I really wanted to brush his dark bangs out of his eyes, and kiss his perfect lips, and run my hands over his chest, and … I gulped my tea.
I couldn’t do any of that, because if Bennett and I stayed together, kept touching and kissing and doing everything else we wanted to do, we’d risk our ghostkeeper powers. So I fiddled with my empty teacup and stared out the window, afraid that if I talked to him we’d have more conversations like the one in the car, and I’d end up climbing into his lap. They didn’t cover this kind of agony in advice columns.
His phone rang and he said, “Hey, look at this.”
I turned from the window to his iPhone, expecting to recognize someone’s name in the caller ID. Instead, there was a picture of the sole of a shoe. Bennett swiped his thumb over the